TheFertilizer
Well-Known Member
Re: 1st Grow - Alaskan Thunderfuck x4 - Durban Poison - Blue Kush & Blueberry In Kind
Familial breeding is very complicated and you might not really get what you wanted out of those seeds. There's so much genetic variability in most cannabis strains, when you breed your ATF #2 with any male the resulting stock might have one or two that actually resemble the ATF #2 you wanted to re-create.
The alternative is back-crossing or self-crossing. Back-crossing, I'll be honest I don't really know what the procedure entails, but it sounds exactly like it is. You'd be keeping a "mother" off of your ATF #2, and then down the line when you find stock that resembles her, you somehow breed it back against the original mother. Not really sure how they accomplish this to be honest with you, but the goal is that you re-enforce the genetic makeup that was in the original plant you liked. With familial breeding, the genetic variability can end up creating some pretty "out there" hybrids, so crossing them back against the original kind of reigns it in a little. You can also use this technique to re-stabilize traits of a mother or father from a cross (so you could for instance back cross Durban Poison out of Girl Scout Cookies), but it's pretty arduous and lengthy process which requires a lot of seed poppping and pheno hunting to even find your mothers that will be like the mother you want to back-cross against.
I know more about selfing and I think that's the better way to go but it requires using chemical treatments. Now when I say "chemical", I'm really just talking about silver in a water solution. The absorption of silver causes a hormonal response that will make a female cannabis plant produce "male" flowers and pollen, but the pollen has the same genetic makeup as the mother. By happenstance, that means it has two Y chromosomes, so people have found that when you breed this pollen against a female plant, the seeds will never have an "X" chromosome, meaning they'll be all 100% female, and that's how feminized seeds are made BUT the real gem of selfing is that you're also stabilizing the genetic makeup that you want with each successive generation that you do this.
So... Say you take ATF #2, and ATF #4, and you take clones off of them both. Well, you can "reverse" a clone of ATF #2 and make it produce pollen, and then pollinate the other female clone of ATF #2, and you'll get seeds that are all female and have the same genetic print. Well, so say you take THOSE plants, and then take a clone, "reverse", and make more "selfed" seeds then you're taking that genetic code and duplicating it again while all the "recessive" genes kind of fade away while the dominant ones become re-enforced. They've figured out that 8 successive runs of this will virtually extinguish all of the dormant genes, leaving only your dominant genes on and resulting on "homogeneous" genes or what's known as "stabilized". In other words, you plant 10 seeds, and they'll all grow at the same rate, size, shape, and uniformity. Then of course you can do the same with ATF #4 and have a mixed crop of homogonized strains. Then even beyond that, what you'll find is that sometimes you get a "genetic drag" where not having this genetic variability makes plants lose vigor over many generations of cloning; well, if you have two very stabilized seed stocks of ATF #4 and ATF #2, you can breed them together, and get a brand new re-vigorized stock that will be very easy to pick through and re-select the phenos you want from.
Anyway not to overload you with information, but it really depends on what you want and it sounds like you just want seed-stock to last you, and for that I'd really steer away from familial breeding. It can be done of course, but pheno hunting takes a long time and a lot of plants and youll probably find yourself sick of ATF by the time you're even done with it, so unless you have the space and time to run a lot of other strains on the side I'd go with selfing hands down. A lot of people feel like it's not "natural", but you're not actually doing anything to the plant that it can't do itself.
Familial breeding is very complicated and you might not really get what you wanted out of those seeds. There's so much genetic variability in most cannabis strains, when you breed your ATF #2 with any male the resulting stock might have one or two that actually resemble the ATF #2 you wanted to re-create.
The alternative is back-crossing or self-crossing. Back-crossing, I'll be honest I don't really know what the procedure entails, but it sounds exactly like it is. You'd be keeping a "mother" off of your ATF #2, and then down the line when you find stock that resembles her, you somehow breed it back against the original mother. Not really sure how they accomplish this to be honest with you, but the goal is that you re-enforce the genetic makeup that was in the original plant you liked. With familial breeding, the genetic variability can end up creating some pretty "out there" hybrids, so crossing them back against the original kind of reigns it in a little. You can also use this technique to re-stabilize traits of a mother or father from a cross (so you could for instance back cross Durban Poison out of Girl Scout Cookies), but it's pretty arduous and lengthy process which requires a lot of seed poppping and pheno hunting to even find your mothers that will be like the mother you want to back-cross against.
I know more about selfing and I think that's the better way to go but it requires using chemical treatments. Now when I say "chemical", I'm really just talking about silver in a water solution. The absorption of silver causes a hormonal response that will make a female cannabis plant produce "male" flowers and pollen, but the pollen has the same genetic makeup as the mother. By happenstance, that means it has two Y chromosomes, so people have found that when you breed this pollen against a female plant, the seeds will never have an "X" chromosome, meaning they'll be all 100% female, and that's how feminized seeds are made BUT the real gem of selfing is that you're also stabilizing the genetic makeup that you want with each successive generation that you do this.
So... Say you take ATF #2, and ATF #4, and you take clones off of them both. Well, you can "reverse" a clone of ATF #2 and make it produce pollen, and then pollinate the other female clone of ATF #2, and you'll get seeds that are all female and have the same genetic print. Well, so say you take THOSE plants, and then take a clone, "reverse", and make more "selfed" seeds then you're taking that genetic code and duplicating it again while all the "recessive" genes kind of fade away while the dominant ones become re-enforced. They've figured out that 8 successive runs of this will virtually extinguish all of the dormant genes, leaving only your dominant genes on and resulting on "homogeneous" genes or what's known as "stabilized". In other words, you plant 10 seeds, and they'll all grow at the same rate, size, shape, and uniformity. Then of course you can do the same with ATF #4 and have a mixed crop of homogonized strains. Then even beyond that, what you'll find is that sometimes you get a "genetic drag" where not having this genetic variability makes plants lose vigor over many generations of cloning; well, if you have two very stabilized seed stocks of ATF #4 and ATF #2, you can breed them together, and get a brand new re-vigorized stock that will be very easy to pick through and re-select the phenos you want from.
Anyway not to overload you with information, but it really depends on what you want and it sounds like you just want seed-stock to last you, and for that I'd really steer away from familial breeding. It can be done of course, but pheno hunting takes a long time and a lot of plants and youll probably find yourself sick of ATF by the time you're even done with it, so unless you have the space and time to run a lot of other strains on the side I'd go with selfing hands down. A lot of people feel like it's not "natural", but you're not actually doing anything to the plant that it can't do itself.
