L.A. Confidential Pheno Hunt

[Dirty Ernie]

Strain: L.A. Confidential (O.G. L.A. Affie x landrace Afgani Indica)
Location: indoor
Lights: Homebuilt CFL veg, HTG LED 3.0 flower
Timers: 18-6 veg, 13-11 flower
Rack: 32” x 39” homebuilt in a closet-veg, 2 x 6 metal rack with 2 x 2 sliding wire shelves - bloom room
Containers: square plastic with trays. Sequence is solo cups, 2 liter square>5 liter>12 liter>19 liter (12” square)
Medium: DNC soil
Nutes: DNC recipe inoculation aerated tea, aerated DNC recipe bloom (recipes in thread)
Training: various, pruning to shape in veg, low stress and high stress training, topping, fim.

This is a retrospective thread that will describe my methods used to deconstruct the genetics contained in my source seeds. My goal was to develop a pheno that would be customized to my tastes, growing methods, and equipment. Also to comply with the requirements of the Michigan Medical Marihuanna Program for patient home grows. To the best of my knowledge, everything described in this journal is compliant and fully legal in the State of Michigan.

So where to start? As always, at the beginning. Tomorrow.

 

[Old Salt]

I'm looking forward to it.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

Let’s start with the seeds. I guess you’d say bag seeds, but a good grade of bag seeds. My dispensaries menu said

L.A. Con, seeded, 14% (potent)

I had been thinking about how to start a grow, but no seeds. So I’m going cool I’ll quick go pick them up. The bud tender said, yeah, they are viable. He got out a bud and showed me how to find the seeds. I’m said it’s only 14%. He said the seeded sometimes tests lower for THC but the bud can still be potent. So I got a 1/4 and took it home and cleaned it.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

There were 104 seeds. I put 5 in a shot glass for a few hours, then the paper plate and paper towel thing. All five popped in a couple days. I got a bag of soil at my local horticultural supply store. We had some solo cups. Drilled holes in the solo cups, filled with damp soil and planted the beans root down. I put them barely under the soil line, now I think it’s better to be a little deeper like maybe 3/8”. All five came up out of the soil, woo hoo. I was so excited.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

At the beginning, I was just making it up as I was going along. I read a lot of stuff from google and YouTube, and then too I’ve been growing vegetables for 50 years plus, so there’s that. I stuck the 5 solo cups on a metal shelf we’re i had a potato plant growing. I had been growing that with a 43 watt 6500 cfl. In the meantime I set up a small table in my small exercise room and hung a couple chicken heat lamps with cfl’s from the ceiling. The plants seemed to like that for 10 days or so.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

The second sets of leaves were forming on Day 10. They were left on the temporary table with the brooding lamp cfl’s thru Day 23 to grow out a bit. Lighting timer was set to 18-6. On Day 24 the plants were transplanted in to bigger pots in my water only type soil. No added nutes. By now I had screwed together a better shelf and lined it with white foam board and a survival blanket.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

As you can see in the second photo above, 2 pheno types appeared immediately. 3 of the plants had broader leaves and a more squat appearance. The other two were taller and skinnier leaves. My reading on lacon lead me to understand the OG LA Affie parent has an unknown, probably just Mexican Sativa mixed in. The Afghani part is definitely indica. Some people claim to have extracted 4 different phenos. But at that point I saw just 3 that seemed to be totally indica and 2 with some sativa influences. This might explain why the strain although thought of as totally indica, it can also be a little cerebral and active, and not just pain relief and couchlock.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

Some notes from the paper journal I kept:
D25 mixed inoculation tea with worm castings and unsulfured blackstrap molasses.
D26 Fed tea. Thinking about verifying male/female, starting to research that
D27 visually inspecting for insects or deficiencies. Plants have 5 nodes.
D29 couple flies and waspy things. Killed manually. Temp 71 rh 65%.

 

[CO Finest]

Looking real nice. Wow 104 seeds. Makes me think of all the rip off seed companies people deal with, that would of cost you around 520$ average. I love the nice colors and tiger stripes on your seeds also nice size. I will bet 90%+ of them seeds will be female unless they were breeding them plants you got the buds from. If it was pollinated by herm then most should be female. Will be just like fem seeds. The only quick way to check male/female I know of is to clone and put clones in 12/12 right away (no roots needed) and look for hairs in a few days. Once again nice grow I wish you the best take care.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

Skipping forward, I spent the next 60 days or so ( June and July) in a learning mode. I grew out my 5 plants kind of waiting for sex characteristics to show, then thinning my herd, learning to take cuttings and grow them into clones, and improving my grow room. I built a separate closet for seedlings, clones and veg, then set up a home center wire rack and bought a couple LED grow lights (HTG 3.0 360’s).
So of the 5 beginner plants, I ended up cruelly discarding the 2 less interesting ones, planting 1 in a back field, flipping 1 to bloom, and taking 6 cuttings each from what I saw as the best plants. I labeled them P1 and P2. P1 was growing shorter with wide fat leaves and short intermodal spacing, P2 was more vigorous, skinnier, and the leaves were more narrow and pointy.
When the cuttings had grown and transplanted into bigger pots I took them out of of the closet and put them on my new rack under the LED’s on 12-12 timing.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

As it turned out, my seed stash turned out to produce all females. Well, the five seeds I popped were all female is a better way to put it I guess. I decided to move on with cloning. I looked at my five plants and discarded 2 of them that seemed the least desirable. Of the remainder, I picked the shorted, most stocky with tight intermodal spacing as a mother. The tallest most vigorous looking plant became the other mother. The third one I put right into the bloom area. I took 6 clones from each of the mothers and they were moved to the bloom rack with 12-12 light timing. See photos above.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

The legal fine print for Michigan Medical grows has a limit of 12 viable plants. In addition you are allowed clones and/or seedlings that are less than 8 inches tall. These are considered to be non-viable, and don’t count against the 12 plant limit. These restrictions make it necessary to be very selective with my pheno hunt. But it does force you to discard the least attractive plants, which is a plus and is pretty standard in plant breeding.
So I made a decision to take 6 clones from each mother. From each 6 clones, I picked only the 1 I liked best as the next mother, discard 4, and move the second best to the bloom rack. This means a lot of plant material gets discarded to the compost pile!
Moving forward I began to see the short stocky pheno grew like an indica, and the taller type grew more like a sativa. I called these P1 and P2.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

Here is a question! I think the standard thing to say is that a cutting/clone is genetically identical to its mother. But as I moved forward with groups of 6 cuttings from each mother, I found that the resulting clones would have differences that allowed me to continue selecting the “best” from each group. So my wife and I would get out the six clones and always we were able to say, of the 6 this one is the next mother. Odd when you think about it.
I’m 72 years old. I don’t have time to monkey around. I simply accepted that some plants were more attractive to me than others and just moved forward.
My thought is the genetics in my original seeds were diverse, not stabilized, and that what is happening is the deconstruction of the strain back to its formative landraces. Online research I found that LACon is thought to have 4 different phenos, and in fact by the fourth generation of mothers I indeed ended up with 4 different types.

 

[Old Salt]

I have the same assumption as you do, the clones have identical genes as the mother.

What I've read is that the original plant derived from seed will behave differently than the clones. The clones taken from different parts of the plant mature differently. The clone taken when topping the plant will behave differently than ones take from the first branches, which in turn will be different from those take further down the line.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

The legal fine print for Michigan Medical grows has a limit of 12 viable plants. In addition you are allowed clones and/or seedlings that are less than 8 inches tall. These are considered to be non-viable, and don’t count against the 12 plant limit. These restrictions make it necessary to be very selective with my pheno hunt. But it does force you to discard the least attractive plants, which is a plus and is pretty standard in plant breeding.
So I made a decision to take 6 clones from each mother. From each 6 clones, I picked only the 1 I liked best as the next mother, discard 4, and move the second best to the bloom rack. This means a lot of plant material gets discarded to the compost pile!
Moving forward I began to see the short stocky pheno grew like an indica, and the taller type grew more like a sativa. I called these P1 and P2.

In these photos, the first one, this pheno makes a big bud at the top of each stem that is very sticky with resin, it tends to have purple stems on the fan leaves, and the sugar leaves turn dark. I selected for this dark appearance of the bud. P1.
The other pheno grows taller, wants to stretch, and the buds are smaller but lots of them are scattered down the stem. I call this one P2.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

I have the same assumption as you do, the clones have identical genes as the mother.

What I've read is that the original plant derived from seed will behave differently than the clones. The clones taken from different parts of the plant mature differently. The clone taken when topping the plant will behave differently than ones take from the first branches, which in turn will be different from those take further down the line.

Yes that is very interesting. My reading did indicate different hormones from different levels of the plant. I had a lot of trouble making clones from topping material, much easier with material lower down.

 

[Dirty Ernie]

Nature v. Nurture

Everyone has had this conversation. Is behavior and traits determined more by nature (genetics) or nurture (in this case details of grow practices). Old Salt really got me thinking. I thought I knew what a pheno hunt was. I thought I would grow out a few seeds, pick a couple I liked, grow them as mothers, take cuttings, select the best clones, do the mother and cut thing again, etc. until I had the plant I liked best.

In fact this is what I did. I planted 5 seeds, I made 4 generations like that, each time selected my favorite plant from a group of six clones. By generation 4, I had actually 4 phenos I liked. 3 grew like the indica LACon is supposed to be, and one looked more like a sativa type. Of the indica, one was short, squat, dark green and very sticky. The second I nicknamed Deep Purple, also small, very dark almost black sugar leaves, and a strong trippy effect. The third has a very distinctive terpene profile like fuel or perfume. The sativa is taller and has smaller buds kind of scattered down the stem.

So. At that point point I thought the process had isolated some of the original breeding characteristics of the genetics. Now from thinking about Old Salts input that growing methods also influence the way plants grow and develop. Which is so obvious i altogether missed that idea. In fact 90% of this site describes every possible permutation of lighting, nutrition, timing, methods, etc.

So the nurture part of it is one part of the story and genetics is the other part.

So that will be the next part of this tale. During my pheno hunt I was also learning my growing style methods and experimenting with stuff.

Happy Mother’s Day May 12, 2019!