Working With Pollen

[Emilya Green]

Today I wish to describe my current project, producing, gathering, storing and using pollen.

The strain is AK-47. When I started this winter run, I planted 4 AK-47 regulars, and as the odds would have it, ended up with 2 males. These frisky guys were immediately isolated to a special stand alone 2x1 love tent and were not up-potted with the rest of the group.

Over the last month, the boys have matured while the girls in the big 4x4 bloom tent continued to veg and prepare for their debut. Right on schedule, within days of flipping the switch in the bloom tent, the boys became ready. The love tent has a peeping tom feature to it, so without disturbing them, or releasing any of their pollen, I have been able to look in the little windows to check on them. Yesterday I noticed that pollen was falling all around the tent, several fan leaves coated with the nasty stuff.

So today, stripped down to a sports bra and panties, I turned off all fans in the area and carefully opened the tent. Armed with my snips, a picture frame with a clean glass front, a credit card and two different sizes of paint brushes, I went to work. Carefully I gathered as much of the pollen as I could, bent down branches to my picture frame and gently shook the pollen to the glass. Once I knew I had enough, I sprayed the area down with my mister, plants, walls floor.. everything... soaked it all down real good to kill any remaining pollen. I will later go in with a bucket and a sponge and lots of clean bleach water... but that is later... I am practically naked at this point.

Next step was to bag and remove the guys, and get them out to the back porch to the supersoil compost bin. The soil is cooking out there for a couple of months before the next run, and the boys were chopped up and mixed in with this soil to send all of their goodness and their rootballs back into the mix for the next plants to use. The soil was watered again, mixed thoroughly (now I am almost naked and dirty up to my elbows) and we are done with the boys. They served well and I am proud of them.

The next step was to clean out the green debris from my pollen powder and work with it to make it more manageable. For this task, the paintbrushes and the credit card become very valuable tools. I ended up with a nice pile of pollen, and then next to it, I put an equal amount of flour to mix 50:50. This makes a very easy to work with powder, that will stay put when I use my small watercolor paintbrush to aggressively paint selective buds in the flower tent. More on that later when we get to that point, for today we are just preparing pollen.

Now that I have all this pollen put away, I have taken a shower and put on clean clothes. I will wait an hour for any possible floating pollen to settle down, and then I will turn all the fans back on. Task done, and I am clean. Could it get any better?

The resulting combined pile of flour and pollen

Then, this pile was carefully picked up with the credit card and paintbrushes, and put into an empty clean prescription pill bottle, with a desiccant pack to keep it dry. It is now stored in my fridge... waiting for the end of stretch and the official beginning of bloom.

I will continue this thread with chapter two in a couple of weeks... the actual pollination of a bud. I plan on producing a bunch of AK-47 seeds at the end of this, along with some interesting crosses of TangerAK Dream 47 and AKGC (AK Crack) Hope to see you then!

Sense Emilya

 

[Spitz]

Hard to imagine those two young boys had you naked and covered in dirt.. Lol.

Nice write up. Since you have a "love tent", have you dabbled In making feminized pollen yet? I do like fem seeds.

 

[Emilya Green]

Hard to imagine those two young boys had you naked and covered in dirt.. Lol.

Nice write up. Since you have a "love tent", have you dabbled In making feminized pollen yet? I do like fem seeds.

I have dabbled, but with limited success. Last year one of the big experiments was using silver bars to create my own colloidal silver spray... and let's just say that the experiment needs to be revisited. I ran out of grow season last year and couldn't try again. That might be something to work on again here in a couple of months though, when I have to cull the clones for the next run... one of those girls might get sprayed. Thanks for the reminder!

 

[Emilya Green]

Yesterday, we had sex in the bloom tent.

Well, at least a few of my buds did...

One bud of each of my plants, now in flower for less than a week, has been chosen to be pollinated. I did not choose any of the 4 main tops, and tried to choose one of the first lower branches that now has reached up to canopy level. Using a small watercolor paint brush and my pollen/flour mix, I painted the pollen onto each of these buds, poking it fairly aggressively into the bud and trying to coat the pistils as much as possible, without having too much extra pollen flying around. The flour makes it mostly stick where I put it and this minimizes the danger of finding seeds all over the plant at harvest. The fans were all turned off for this process, but after a few hours they were all turned back on and I am sure that a little bit of random pollen/flour mix will cause a few random seeds in some of the other buds in this run, but mostly it will be just on these 4 branches. I have marked each of these branches by attaching a binder clip to each, so even if all the pollen ends up being hidden by the developing bud, I will know which branches are special.

At the end, I will most likely want my seeds to develop a week or two longer than the rest of the buds. I will harvest everything but these 4 branches and then will move these 4 plants out of the bloom tent to mature the seeds and make room for the next round. Right now we can not see any immediate change to the pistils on these 4 branches, but over the next several days we will keep watching them for signs of pollination, and if we don't see it, we will try again. I will also be trying to pollinate some of the lower buds on those branches too, but for now we were just trying to make sure that the top bud on that branch has been pollinated, with the confidence that each of these are capable of producing 20-50 seeds.

Be well everyone,
Emmie

Cross your fingers... we should see bent and darkening pistils soon...

 

[OlderGrower]

Hi Emilya, I know how important it is to document these things so next time you get the urge to strip down to panties and a sports bra, feel free to howler at me, and I will operate the camera for you so you can have 100% documentation. I only offer my services for the enrichment of science

 

[Emilya Green]

Hi Emilya, I know how important it is to document these things so next time you get the urge to strip down to panties and a sports bra, feel free to howler at me, and I will operate the camera for you so you can have 100% documentation. I only offer my services for the enrichment of science

The sacrifices that we make in the name of science sometimes are astounding! Your dedication to the hobby and the science involved are noted, and the next time we need a photographer, you will certainly come to mind!

 

[Emilya Green]

ok, here under MH light is a comparison of each of the 4 girls... first a normal bud, and then a pollinated bud. You decide.

Tangerine Dream x AK47

Green Crack x AK47

AK47 x AK47 (x 2)

 

[Emilya Green]

All of the pollinated branches are showing activity not becoming of a flower, but one of the plants has taken off with seed production in a big way. This is happening on my smaller ak-47, and she is most definitely pollinated. Already I can see at least 5 seed pods, and surprisingly some seed activity going on in the buds right below the top on that branch too. I expect over the next week to see similar activity in the other plants too.

 

[Stanovich420]

Hope i will be able to do this aswell ,good job

 

[JBUptown]

Appreciate the Journal, good information sharing!

Thanks

JB

 

[Emilya Green]

Today I got a good look at what the Tangerine Dream / AK-47 cross was looking like... sure enough, she is producing some seeds for us too.

 

[veinz]

what is the best time to do this?? pollinating that is...
collected some pollen and put it in deepfreezer is this ok??? it was from suprise seeds seems to be somewhat sativa kind
now got this no name from medical seeds that i put in bloom with some other sisters but its not doing well no that's wrong it's staying smaller than the other ones, can i pollinate this with the pollen?????

nice journals you got going on...

 

[Emilya Green]

Veinz,
You want to get the pollinating done pretty early, because to really mature a seed out takes a bit longer than most of us run our buds. I expect to do a selective harvest in about 6 weeks, taking the buds to the drying tent, and letting the branches producing seeds go on a bit longer. I waited until that day that happens about a week after you do the 12/12 switch, where one day you can see that she is getting ready to get going with blooming, and then the next day she is exploding with pistils. This for me is the official start of flower, and I mark it on the calendar. That day, I was in there with the pollen. I also went back a week later, and hit the same buds again, making sure the pollen went where I intended, and also going for the next two buds down the stem.

I was afraid to put my pollen in the deep freezer, and stored mine in the fridge instead. Please let me know if the deep freeze appears to have hurt the viability of that pollen. As far as doing it on the runt of the group, I think that is a great call... make that girl work for the money you have to spend on her to keep her going.

Thanks on the journals too... much appreciated.

 

[Emilya Green]

Yesterday after confirming that pollination has indeed occurred on all 4 plants, I used my misting spray bottle to deactivate and remove the remaining pollen/flour residue on the buds. This gave us a clear view of what a fertilized bud looks like, compared to a fertile and non pollinated branch right next to it. Each of these pollinated buds are sure to produce 50 or more seeds... Emmie is very pleased.

 

[glimmergrass]

Completely fascinating. Thank you, Emilya.

 

[TameGuerrilla]

This is a great, thank you for taking the time to write this up
Subbed

 

[Emilya Green]

Here we are at day 28 of flower, with the pollinated buds really getting to work producing seeds. Every one of these seeded buds have gotten too heavy to hold themselves up and were trying to lean toward the ground so as to make sure to drop the seeds in this very fertile soil at their feet. Being wise to their tricks, I propped each of these heavy branches up with garden stakes and tape. There are going to be a lot of seeds that come of of this grow!

 

[Emilya Green]

(bloom, day 31) Lights at 10:15/13:45

Today we are about half way through this grow and we can see significant maturing of the buds already. This sliding toward wintertime lighting has to be the cause of such rapid development. The seeded branches look to be doing very well, and here they are for your enjoyment, in MH light.

Tangerine Dream x AK47

AK47 X AK47

 

[Curly Beaver]

Great thread Emmie, it's written so that the average Joe can understand what you are doing and documented with nice pics as well. Not only will I follow along now that I found it, but will save it to try later on myself.
Thanks for putting it on so we can follow along.

(+ reps)

 

[Emilya Green]

From here on we will look at a few pictures from the end of the process.

Here are some seeds from about 1/3 of the pollinated bud on our Green Crack... there are somewhere near 100 seeds so far while we wait for this bud to dry out. Emmie is pleased.