Breeding For Seeds: Hybrid Vigour Vs Stabilizing The Strain

Ok, here we go. 4 White Kush Feminized & 10 Afgani Regular. I would rather had started with Regular White Kush but you cannot get them.

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Hey MedFarmer

I have done seeds a few times with no more mission than to get seeds, not truly to create seeds with traits.
That will come when I have my own dedicated grow room.

so far I have used a male Querkle to pollinate female seeded plants of Tutankhamen (AK47), Cream Carmel a Aphrodite and a WW.
A few have been grown out and all good so far.

Then I used Tiresias Mist on a WW and Cheese and have created some WWxWW, WWxBubbaKush, WWxCheese, WWx(WWxQuerkle).
Again all have turned out nice plants and the same were made with the Cheese as the pollen donor.

This summers experiment has a little more of a mission.
To preserve my infamous strongest strain I have smoked this century. The WW

The clones I have been getting seem to be loosing s bit of vigor.
They are clone of clone of clone going on 8-10 generations now.

I was advised by a few to grow her outside to rejuvenate the genetics.
That's where I am at now.

I started 2 of my WWxWW seeds and started spraying one of them with the mist and will use that pollen on the other and anything else I will have around this year.

I also am spraying another WW I started about a month earlier and will use that to pollinate a WWxCheese I have growing.
I figure if the WWxWW still has problems a WW x WWxCh might do the trick, (the Cheese was among the top 5 strains I have grown so far. Some say it is better than my Widow, but the WW is so strong it feels like you got a shot of something to make you that hi.

good luck on your seed project.
 
MedFarmer said:
A long but good video about breeding

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Damn, that was long. I think it sums up the state of the cannabis industry as it exists today. A few breeders sitting at a table answering questions about breeding, but not giving any specific detail as to how to accomplish anything. I mean, why would they want to tell you how to breed? They are in the business of selling seed.

These days anyone can go buy a pack of seeds, chuck some pollen around, collect the seed, give it some fantastic name and start selling them for large profits. This is exactly what Subcool did, he never bred anything just bought other peoples beans, crossed them and renamed the stuff. He openly admits it in the video,

Sub Cool

I am not a breeder, I am a seedmaker
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but he does what he does, people buy his stuff and he makes a living. Can't blame the guy. It just highlights the fact that today it has never been easier for anybody to produce seeds that will grow into fine plants. If you are a grower wanting to play around with pollen it's just a natural progression to produce your own seed.

Well 30+ years ago when I made that progression there were no seed banks, no books on how to grow weed, no internet and video cassettes were cutting edge technology.

The only place we could get seed was from the weed were buying. Oh the joy as you unwrapped the cotton off your thai stick and a seed falls into the bowl. You'd pick it up like some treasured sacred artifact, carefully placing it in your seed container to be planted out in the spring. Yeah, we had no lights back then either.

In the spring you'd go out into the bush, hack out a little clearing and put your seeds in. Periodically you'd go and check on them, waiting for autumn to come so you'd get some bud only to find that your thai plants were full hermie and pollinated your whole crop. :rofl: Then we grew those seeds out to find that hermie breeds hermie. It didn't take us long to figure out we needed to grow the thai separately from the other types of weed we were growing.

Now don't get me wrong, that thai cross Colombian or whatever we were growing ( we had no idea where our seeds originated but we knew the compressed stuff wasn't a local product) was fantastic weed. Sure it was full of seed but it would tear your head off when you smoked it. The plants were HUGE!! It was our first introduction to growing hybrids and hybrid vigor.

So we started planting out crops of only two plants from different strains in multiple locations. It was just a crude form of open pollination, but it worked. Our F1's weren't uniform in appearance, but we were producing much better smoke than we could buy and that was good enough for us.

My point is, we had no one to teach us. Everything we learned was through observation and trial and error.

Fast forward to today.............

Man, you guys have it sooo easy. You can jump online and order seeds of any kind from literally hundreds of different varieties. You can buy equipment tailor made to grow the stuff in any manner of different ways. Quite frankly, this is THE golden age of homegrown weed. We've never had it better.

Now I'm going to tell you what the guys in the video don't want you to know.

There is no secret method to breeding good cannabis. It's simply a plant and can be bred using the same modern breeding techniques that were developed like 100 years ago. The same techniques that were used to improve corn, wheat and all the rest of the stuff we grow.

If you want to play with feminised seed, type this into google,

"How to breed self pollinated plants"

If you want to play with standard seed, type this into google,

"How to breed cross pollinated plants"

There is so much info out there you will drown in it. Just substitute the word "cannabis" for whatever strain they are using as an example because the principles are exactly the same.

If you are going to be approaching your breeding in a serious manner, you will be collecting data from your grows. Don't rely on your memory because whether you know it or not, your memory sux.

Go back to google, type

"free plant breeding software"

there are heaps of them and they are free. They will allow you to log your data, attach photo's from all stages of growth, create family tree's and a host of other good features.

You are now on your way to becoming a world class breeder. :yahoo: :cheertwo:
 
Okay here is the breeding stock hopefully.

B=Breeding
WK=White Kush
A=Afghani

I had 10 Afghani seeds and at least 8 were sprouted then when I took them into the greenhouse to pot them, I knocked the open pot and they all fell onto the greenhouse floor. From that I managed to find 6, and of the 6 only 2 sprouted. I hope they are males.

The White Kush are females as you cannot get them as regulars. Not an ideal start for breeding stock but I'll go with it for now.

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TheNuttyProfessor said:
how many times would i have to pollinate my blue blood with my tch bomb to make the blue blood auto cross thc bomb ?
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Only once, but it depends on your goal and the way you approach it.

Option 1

Cross the two plants. You will end up with F1 plants that are 50% from each parent.

Because you are working with hybrids the cross will be messy and probably have a huge range of phenotypes so you'll need to breed numbers, even then you may not find an F1 that resembles the blue blood. If you do, self it.

25% of the seed will be auto, but because F2 will display all possible combinations of the F1 genetics (given sufficient numbers) you may not end up with an auto that looks like the blue blood. If you are really lucky and do find one, self it again and the F3 will be 100% auto. The problem now is even if you find a plant that looks like the blue blood (slim chance) you'll never be able to recreate it. The only option would be to self it again but with 4 self crosses you will be getting a lot of possibly negative traits showing up and outcrossing is not an option as you'd lose it.

You could create 2 separate lines at the F2 and cross them at F4, but generally this method would be regarded as sloppy breeding because your original parents were not homozygous.

Option 2

Pick the blue blood that is the most potent and shows no signs of herming. Self it. As the blue blood is an F1 hybrid the seed from the selfing will technically be an F2 generation from the original breeders cross. You will see some plants that look like each original parent and everything in between. You will probably find a better plant than the original blue blood in this generation.

Because of the selfing roughly 50% of this generation will be homozygous. Pick a plant that most resembles your blue blood (I would select for potency here as well) and self again. Now you had a 50/50 chance of your pick being homozygous. If it was, the F3 generation will look very much like your F2 choice.

If you were unlucky you'll have to select again, but in this generation 75% of the plants will be homozygous so you have a 3 in 4 chance of picking a homozygous plant. Self again

You should now have plants that look very similar to each other and look like the original blue blood.

Select the best plant and clone it, keep it alive. This will become your "recurrent" parent. We'll call it 'RP'

What we are going to do now is create a Mono-hybrid, ie, we are going to transfer 1 gene from the donor plant (THC Bomb) being the autoflower trait into the recurrent parent (blue blood)

** At this point you can use any autoflowering plant as we are only chasing the autoflower trait, nothing else.

Cross Bomb (pollen donor) with Blue Blood RP (seed producer) = F1

F1 x F1 = F2

25% of F2 will be autoflower, pick plant that resembles RP and backcross to RP. This creates RPBX1. these seeds will now contain 75% of the RP genes and contain the autoflower gene as a recessive.

RPBX1 x RPBX1 = RPBX1F2

25% of these will be auto. Backcross an auto with RP. This creates RPBX2 and these seeds will now contain 87.5% of the RP genes and contain the autoflower gene as a recessive.

RPBX2 x RPBX2 = RPBX2F2

25% of these will be auto.

Now you have a range of options open to you.

RPBX2F2 x RPBX2F2 will give you 100% auto with 87.5% of plants breeding true for Blue Blood.

RPBX2F2 x RP = RPBX3

If you took it to RPBX3F2 x RPBX3F2 you would have 93% of plants breeding true.

You now have 2 stable true breeding blue blood strains, standard and auto.
 
MedFarmer said:
I like your descriptions HG, always easy to understand.
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That's how it should be. I think a lot of amateur breeders are put off from having a go because when it's explained in technical terms it sounds so complicated.

Professors auto is a very complicated cross but it's achievable.
 
In regard to your free Afghan seeds, I know someone growing them out now. Don't count on the 45 day finishing time. He is at 8 weeks flowering now and has at least a week or 2 before they will be finished.

Apparently they are a pre-release Paradise seeds strain. He only got 6 of 10 germ rate.
 
TheNuttyProfessor said:
im still kind of confused but ill get there , H G , thanks for all your help on the topic , what do you mean by self it :hmmmm:
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reverse the sex and self pollinate the plant.
 
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