Hows it working? We’re all getting stoned…
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But for us green behind the ears…
But not all here are expert breeders and as in multiple forums I am on (other interests) I found that the ones that have tread the ground before do a little hand holding to get us less experienced ones up and running. And some of us that had their hands held take up the torch and light the way for the new batch fumbling in the dark.
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Good to know. I’m gonna have to fire up my lil doobie from last night. And get stoned with you bro. I try no to direct my comments specific to anyone in particular. Sometimes the post falls where it lays and someone will think I’m speaking directly to them. Hell half the time I forget to press reply and it may be a few hours before I respond.
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We know there’s some out there not doing it right friend. Those here are looking to do it right. Try to spend more of ur energy in that direction
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Is hot coffee on the porch in 105 degrees weird? …am i weird?
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Bro I’m still paying for student loan… which is my messed up way of say that the game is to be sold, not told.
I’ll help anyone brother. There is tons of reference material all over this and the ton of posts plastered all over the net.
A few post back it said it takes time and commitment…and resources. Anything beyond that is growers/ breeders choice. If you have anything specific to ask feel free to do so. I’ll answer to the best of my experience.
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That’s the good stuff.
I recall Allard wrote briefly about the subject in one of his books…
Tom Hill has been pushing this idea for years, but none listened.
If anyone is interested, I can look for his take on that…
If you don’t mind, I’m most curious about transgressive segregation. From what I could gather this phenomenon is more frequent in the first few recombination.
Is there any way to put a ratio on that, what would the maths be like ?
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All good.
There was something about challenging the heat that made sense.
I read a paper on that… somewhere… sometime…
Same applies to hot vs cold showers to cool oneself, if it’s 110 outside, and you shower in boiling watah, 110 is a breeze lol
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I know a bunch of cats don’t really wanna get into spraying chems so i try keep to traditional methods when i talk about this stuff.i have selfed, it’s not for me…im this weird naturalist idk.lol. i like nature and im ok with longer wait times…but i know those tools can be vital to a grower when they might need it.
I would appreciate a lookee at that Allard stuff, at your convenience
Page 169, 
Lemme see if I can dig it out, brb
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You mean faceguy? That’s Allard? …but i mean the selfing stuff…
Haha nono principles of plant breeding by r allard, page 169
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Ohhhh lol…i thought you meant here …durp
Id need to look more into transgressive segregation before i could put out numbers…it’s gotta be crazy low right? Im hoping my trifoliates can throw mad monkey wrenches in the machinery and give me some far flung stuff
Males absolutely are individuals the same way females are. If you run a line and find only one or a few females that are fantastic out of all of them,
I’m not starting out on day one looking for “just one or a few fantastic females.” That’s a fallacy. It essentially boils down to greed, impatience, and short-sightedness.
It seems like you, underneath it all, are just simply unwilling to put in the work it really takes over many generations to do this job properly. You want “purity”, and you want it now.
You act as if the preservation of extremely important survival traits and other attributes is unimportant. You’re focused exclusively on “what you want”, right now in this moment.
When people talk about “growing out millions of plants”, what they really mean is millions of plants in one generation, for their own ease and convenience in picking out that “one in a million special plant” which will fit your preconceived idea of “perfection.” That’s a fantasy.
If the talk were to turn to growing say 10,000 plants a year over 10 years, or 100 plants a year over 20 years, with an emphasis on enhancing long term viability and sustainability of the strain and/or species, I have a feeling you would have no interest in that line of approach. You want what you perceive as “purity”, and you want it right now. Probably so you can put it in a bag and sell it to someone for big bucks. Right?
When I’m working through a line generation after generation, I’m not focusing so much on individual plants. My focus is on the population as a whole. What I’m looking for are specific traits that are present in the population as a whole which I want to preserve, carry forward, and gradually increase in the general population. In the beginning these traits are scattered around in different random plants. Then there are other traits also which I’d like to slowly breed out.
I go through the females and evaluate each and every one of them, from seedling stage on through final cure and smoke, taking mental and written notes on every aspect of how the plant grows and develops along the way. I observe whatever positive traits the plant may possess, as well as the negative ones. I do not prejudge anything; just take note of it all, and give a final rating based on how well it smokes in the end.
Later on, sometimes much later, the time comes to sprout some seeds. Maybe it’s about to be spring and I’m getting plant ready for outdoors. Maybe I’ve just harvested indoors and the room is open and ready for a new batch. So I’ll sort through my seed collection, look through and study my notes, think about where I’m at in various projects and where I need to go next, and ultimately decide which females should contribute their seed to this project.
My focus is never on cherry picking exceptional females that are perfect in every possible way, because those individuals simply do not exist and never have existed. Particularly early on in the cross between two different strains, you’re going to get a ton of variation, and that is only in the traits you can observe; the traits you cannot observe are equally varied and important, lying hidden beneath the surface.
So I evaluate all observable aspects of a given female from beginning to end, and then later, based on short and long term goals, gather together seeds from all of the best females which each have at least some of the traits that I’m looking to blend into whatever line I’m working on.
Maybe a plant is total garbage in every way, but has one special feature that is killer; there’s a possibility I could use it later on. If on the other hand a plant checks all the boxes, but also has one or two bad features, I will most likely use it in the next generation. I’m not concerned about perfection in any individual plant, but in increasing the concentration of good traits in the population as a whole.
Take this Serious Seeds Bubblegum x Lashkar Gah cross for an example. That was one feminized BG seed crossed with two LG males. I only had ten F1 seeds from that to work with. From this I got six females and two males, which I open pollinated indoors in 32oz drink cups. Due to circumstances ended up losing all those indoor seeds, but fortunately had two of the F1 females outdoors along with one of the males, so I ended up with a bunch of F2 seed from those.
Next generation I sprouted several hundred F2s and planted an outdoor plot in a clearing in the woods. I sprouted these in 72 cell trays, transplanted the survivors into 12oz drink cups, and eventually put about 150 or so in the ground. There were huge variations in the plants. I culled two obviously deficient males, one a hermie, and left the rest alone. Two females (#6 and #8) really stood out from the crowd here, due to their size and overall appearance, and the smoke was pretty good on both also.
I also took cuttings from many of the biggest females and brought them indoors. This one female (#12) which was nothing special outdoors ended up being by far the nicest one indoors. Great appearance, structure, nice nugs, potent smoke, lovely strawberry scent in the curing jar. That’s a perfect example of how you really can’t judge anything as well as you think you can. You cannot fully judge the genotype of a plant by just observing one phenotype.
Later on I did an F3 sprouting, using the seeds from the two biggest and nicest looking females (#6 and #8). Again there was wide variation, but the traits were shuffled around, as it is every time you sprout a new generation.
Some of the resulting plants looked, smelled, and smoked far nicer than either of the two mother plants. Some of them that were really nice, actually…and most of them ended up being totally wiped out by mold.
The parent Lashkar Gah comes from dry, dusty, arid southwestern Afghanistan. It’s not a subtropical environment there, as it is here. Plants there don’t have to worry about mold, so genes for mold resistance have essentially been bred out of the population there. That’s a problem for me here in the southeast USA.
Fortunately, Bubblegum does have its own mold resistance genes which were passed on to this generation. These genes were still present in the population because I wasn’t foolish enough to start out right out of the gate doing heavy culling of males. So while many of these F3 plants ended up being trashed by mold, or weren’t worth a damn to begin with, the random assortment of genes allowed mold resistance genes to shift into a few plants, so they made it along OK and survived.
In the end, there were four phenos that proved to be the ones worth continuing forward with, for the main line at least. These were numbered #3, #5, #12, and #14.
#14 was a large round bush, about 5 foot tall and about the same width, heavily branched and loaded with a high yield of medium-density nugs, with thick stems that easily held the plant and its branches upright. A small percentage of the buds did get ruined by mold, maybe about 10%, but for the most part this plant showed a much higher mold resistance than average for the population. The one downside was the high, which was relatively uninspiring.
#12 was a much smaller plant with somewhat dense, nice looking nugs, clearly BG influenced, with a good structure and a good high. Only downside was its weak stem, which allowed it to flop over later in flower. There was significantly more mold resistance in this one than average.
#5 had the most beautiful flowers which were 100% exactly what I’m looking for, perfect bag appeal, and it also had a good high. Great smoke. Unfortunately it was a tall, narrow plant with a weak stem which allowed it to flop completely over early on. On the plus side, it was mold free.
#3 was a somewhat “boring” but overall good looking plant with perfect structure, good yield of relatively dense flowers, and a good high, also mold free. It had a somewhat weak stem also, which eventually caused it to lean over later in flower.
I picked out these four females not because they were individually the most amazing plant, but because they each had the highest concentration of positive traits that I’m trying to encourage in the line, with the fewest weaknesses. I was particularly focused on mold resistance, which is an important necessity to successfully plants in this hot and humid environment.
Now after a few years of focus elsewhere I’ve finally gotted around to sprouting this F4 generation, from the four selected females. I had 30 F4 females initially, but removed 8 of them to be used elsewhere, and outcrossed to some males of a different line. So now I’ve got 22 females, 22 males, and 3 undetermined just about to start flowering.
In this generation, I already know there will once again be a significant amount of variation. I know also that the population as a whole will generally be more resistant to mold. With the small size of these plants (and their flowers), I don’t expect to lose any of them to mold. Nevertheless, I’m definitely not finished locking in the mold resistance. That will continue over the next few generations. If I do happen to encounter mold problems in any of these females, they will certainly be “culled”, i.e. disqualified from being used in the next generation.
The main selection focus for this year, besides general plant appearance, will be for effect and potency. I loved the big bush structure of #14, but I certainly can’t select for structure, vigor, etc in this generation because these plants are too small to evaluate for those traits. What I specifically need to do here in this generation, is identify which plants have the best effect and potency, and select for those–knowing that they will be open pollinated by a number of males that carry #14’s nice bushy structure in their genes.
Without having smoked these plants yet or seen them in flowering mode, it’s too early to say, but I anticipate being able to select around 50% of the best smoking females to continue on to the next generation.
Next generation I will grow larger plants once again, and selection for mold resistance and structure will resume. I’ll be looking for another pheno like #14 to appear, this time with improved potency and increased mold resistance. I will likely find such a pheno in the next generation, and quite possibly more than one. If I get enough big, bushy females, or at least plants trending in that direction, then I can use only those to sprout the F5s. Otherwise I will once again select the best, and reject the rest, roll the dice and go again.
The end result I will eventually achieve, after several more generations of continuing to work the line in this manner, improving the strain step by step with each generation, is a plant that combines all of the nicest characteristics of those four select phenos. I will continue working this line until that collection of desired traits are commonly found in the majority of the female population, while being assured there is still plenty of genetic diversity for numerous other important traits, many of which I cannot actually observe or test for.
NONE of these plants I’m working with here are the image of perfection, especially not in the beginning when there is such huge variation. There are flaws and weaknesses everywhere, in both males and females. But slowly, gradually, step by step, I will increase the concentration of good traits and work out the flaws, improving the overall population with each generation. I will end up with a tough, hardy strain that can be planted in a subtropical environment like mine, and will grow itself out to a large bush with no babysitting, with a nice mold-free yield of excellent smoke with good bag appeal.
The only way that this is possible is by taking advantage of open pollination, with slow selection over time, allowing the “genetic reshuffling” to occur as much as possible with each generation so the various traits will be shifted around.
It takes a long time to do this job the right way. So do you want to do it the right way, the long and slow way, like the very few are doing…or the short, fast, and wrong way, as the masses always recommend?
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Well it’s not looking too good for the allard book, I can’t find the pdf …
Yeah, idk… the only reference I could find was regarding deep chunk, which is for sure far from its first recombinations and the ratio was 1/300…
I’d guess in the f2, bc and early gens it would have to be 1/50.
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So he found starter in f2? The took it to s3? Holy deepstate batman
From reference and on I was talking about transgressive segregation…
Me no English good 
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I love the cerebral aspect of this stuff man…like brain candy…until it’s not lol
About the selfing scheme…
Transgressive segregation…
Okok, his method calls for 1000 plants… he does mention (elsewhere) that if it isn’t possible, you work with however many you can grow…
Start 100, save top5, self em etc
The “pop 30 per” is somewhat important, but if you can only do 15… do 15
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