TropicPine
420 Member
What are your thoughts on the strain “Golden Tiger” from Ace? I want to grow this strain and breed with it.Nooooooooooooo.........
Man I read all your threads and they're so informative even if a lot of them are cut and paste of other people's stuff.
This is where I've had enough though. In several threads you start off going on about breeding and how you like the great strains of old.... then straight away you start in with this crossing with indica crap. I'm sorry but it is just real bad advice.
I'm a sativa breeder and like many other sativa breeders around the world we spend all our time trying to breed indica genetics out of sativas. Have you got any idea how long it takes to breed even a single indica cross back out of a line? Do the Mendel maths...
Even the landrace sativas these days have indica in them from back in the 70's when the drug cartels took pakistani genetics all over the world so they could get two crops per season instead of one.
Why on earth would we want to do what you are suggesting? The Dutch have spent the last twenty years doing exactly that!!! They completely stuffed all the old sativa lines. Have a look at the old catalogues that you yourself posted up. The standard Dutch idea of breeding is take a sativa then cross it with Afghani. They crossed everything with Afghani.
Since then what you suggest... crossing sativas with AK47, White Widow etc has been done a thousand times. It doesn't produce a good plant at all. It produces a mongrel with phenotypes all over the place. Have you ever actually tried to work with a three way cross or a four way cross?
That is not what we want at all. Genuine sativa breeders (I've been doing it 30 years) these days are searching the globe trying to find landrace genetics that are still clean... and it's just about impossible.
A true equatorial sativa grows into a small tree. They used to be THE MOST COMMON cannabis phenotype from Thailand, Columbia, Mexico and some African strains. They grew 16 - 25 feet and took nine months to fully mature. These days the only tree sativa left that I know of is the Nepalese and nobody has the seeds. The strongest one was always Thai but I haven't seen a genuine Thai tree for years. There is still some original Thai strain seed in Holland and Spain but it's very hard to trust it after twenty years of Dutch breeders selecting the earliest flowering, short plants to seed.
Without exception the most potent equatorial sativa was always the stuff that took longest to finish flowering (20 weeks plus), grew ridiculously tall and was most likely hermie. All the traits that are considered undesirable by Dutch "breeders." Look at the Haze strains they carry now compared to the huge Haze plants that were actually produced by the Haze brothers. Yet the seedbanks have the cheek to call it "Original Haze."
There is not a single old school sativa breeder that I know of who actually believes that crossing with an Indica is a good thing or wants any AK47 or whatever in a sativa line. Why on earth would we want that? Contrary to popular belief no old school grower believes that any of the Dutch strains are more potent than a true equatorial sativa. They're not even close. That is nothing but good marketing by the Dutch to sell their product. Crossing anything except another sativa only weakens the line and introduces a lack of resistance to mould.
The correct way to maintain a pure sativa line but lower height and flowering time is to do it with another sativa. You can cross with something like Kerala or Laos to lower height and use a Himalayan or Swazi (Even Durban) to bring back flowering time a bit. Or you can use something like pure Indonesian which is an absolutely amazing sativa.
The problem with breeding sativas is pure greed. That's all. The Dutch got greedy. An average dope plant produces thousands of seeds. In the old days we could buy 70 pure sativa seeds for $5. You could get 200 Mexican seeds for $20. In reality that is all they are worth anyway. Dope seeds aren't rare. The Dutch have artificially inflated the market value and held it there while they hook teenage kids on growing stunted plants in closets. They've convinced a whole new generation that closet growing is dope growing.
To breed sativa properly you need a LOT of seed. Sure you can get a lot off one mother plant but to breed correctly you have to maintain genetic diversity in the P1 line, not breed it all from a single plant. The Dutch have forced up the price of seed for landrace sativas and muddied the original gene pool. We can't afford to buy 500 seeds anymore, even if we could get them, just to grow them out and pick the ten best to breed from.
Not only that but once upon a time the Dutch practically gave away landrace sativa seed because it stretched too much and took too long to flower. Now they won't even sell it if they do have it. They jealously guard it and keep it to backcross into their own lines because indica hybrids just don't retain their potency when they're inbred or crossed. They produce big buds that look pretty but they have no kick to them.
The most potent killer weed I've ever smoked has always been rubbish looking small pure sativa buds. Usually Thai or Indonesian or Vietnamese. Loose fluffy buds with no weight to them at all, no massive crystal formation, not super sticky, no fancy colours... but with a kick like methamphetamine or crack.
This is my personal opinion from my own experiences growing breeding crops of sativas off and on for thirty years. I've never done a crop in my life that wasn't a seed crop and my biggest was 1500 plants with all my sativas in one place.
m0ng00se
to a heavy-bodied, mind-numbing knock-out stone is a no-brainer or me. If i wanted to be that incapicatated, i'd take an ativan or some other tranquilizer. (Again, that's just my personal preference and i'm plenty aware of the benefits and pratical applications for indicas, especially in the medical/pain-relief field.)
as is possible in today's indica-dominated pot scene.