Dogma

I’ve been popping 1-3 packs of everything I’m growing lately, for the largest sample size I can fit in one or two 5×5 tents – and I still gotta flower them out when they’re pretty short. Maybe 18” tops. Plants that are great for SOG do really well, but if they’re not at all SOG friendly, it gets really unruly. Still, I’m able to make excellent judgements on the keepers, & get the full picture of trichomes, terps, color, & vigor, & I’ve somehow been able to pre-judge plant structure too. I guess I’ve just got a good feel for the patterns that cannabis grows in after so many years cultivating and breeding. But I also focus on this Micro-Blooming as I call it to choose parents for F2s. For virtually everything I grow. I take cuts of every plant – I don’t have the balls that Matt Riot does (he pheno hunts using the same method but only clones the males since they’re a bitch to reveg, but totally relies on revegging for the females). I’m great at revegging but I’ve had a few excellent phenotypes fail to revert prior to senescence, & I feel like an extra hour or two of work is worth the peace of mind. I space the cuttings out in 3 cloners even though each one has 36 spots, since I usually trash 75%+ & by the time I’m finished growing & slow-drying I can usually cut the females down to half the number I started with, but by this point they’re all rooted and starting to get pretty large, which is why I space them all out over multiple cloners. The worst possible thing is when the roots of particularly vigorous phenotypes get tangled together. It’s not even like trying to untangle wires. If the roots get tangled, the plants get stuck in the cloner and as gentle as I try to be, tearing the roots causes the plants an extreme amount of stress, as does carefully trimming them apart. And I heard trimming roots was just like trimming the vegetation. My ass. Usually they’re so large by this point that they’ll survive (or at least most of the plant will – the roots correspond to certain parts of the visible plant, with the shallowest roots corresponding to the base of the plant and the deepest roots to the newest / freshest growth. Which tends to die back when you’ve gotta seriously disentangle two or more rooted clones to even get them out of the aeroponic cloner. Worst case, the plant dies. Even if the clone has grown some massive green growth, if the roots aren’t really abundant and healthy – say they’re long but there’s only about a dozen main roots, the plant is much more fragile than it may seem. Anyway, my new method keeps the roots away from each other at least until harvest and usually into the cure. Male plants are much easier to cull, although I take all the apparent keepers through their entire life cycles to make sure there’s no late flowering weirdness. Unfortunately growing the males in a SOG configuration causes the pollen from the plants to get all over each other, but it’s all good since I’ll have rooted cuttings that are typically so sparse in the male cloners that a little shuffling, if necessary, prevents any tangling at all. The weird thing about males that I’ve discovered is that sometimes the best offspring don’t come from the frostiest, stinkiest fathers, but from fathers with the best structure, or vigor, etc. Males are tricky since those really 🔥 frost stinkers often don’t pass on the traits you chose them as keepers for. Sometimes the traits you most want to see from your male come from a male that seemed average – but even if they didn’t express the genes you most like in a particular cultivar, their offspring do, while a male you would expect to produce the best offspring don’t pass those same traits on – at least not to the F1 generation. So I tend to reverse my favorite females to produce feminized pollen & seeds, whose genetically inherited traits are far more predictable IMHO. There’s still the unknowns of how the two plants will express themselves & the phenotype %s in the F1 generation. Selecting your best F2s, given the typical reality of the F1 x F1 = your F2s factors of the modern seed market can result in some extreme phenotypic variation in the F2s made from your polar opposite of true breeding F1s, each with several phenotypes. A really large sample size of F2s is recommended, since you’re likely to find almost as many variations as seeds you grow out. But excellent selection & continued Inbreeding eventually gives you far more true breeding plants. The same is true of multiple Bxs, or the complex breeding practices that isolate & increase one of the original parents’ genetics in each generation. But indeed, in addition to hunting the best phenotypes, I try to make F2s of as many cultivars as I can since you’ll be able to take the breeding in a totally different direction, as well as help preserve the original genetics of the cultivar, without adding even more genetics to the gene pool. When I’ve got several keepers – say 3 males I think will best pass on the genetics I like, & 5 females that are all really nice, my F2s will typically be a combination of all 8 plants grown together, in the hopes I capture most of the cultivar’s genetics in all those technically single cultivar F2s that may actually have extremely distinct genetics, with the seed stock from each female coming from 3 males each. Keeping them separate or mixing them all together is a personal choice at this point. If the cultivar was feminized to begin with I can only make feminized F2s. Or S1s if only a single female is really that much more superior. Breeding ain’t easy at all. Even the professionals have their issues. There’s a reason that when a breeder releases a large line of crosses with the same reversed or male parent, that there tend to be only a couple of the many members of the line that are used by many breeders working entirely separately. Even the best breeders release some crosses that don’t produce many keepers, if any. Lack of terps, lack of vigor, effects issues, little to no resistance to mold or mildew, & god forbid, common hermaphroditic traits in certain cultivars aren’t as uncommon as they should be, from newer & long established breeders alike. Making seeds from two killer plants isn’t the end of your job as a breeder. Ideally you & a well selected team of experienced growers from many potential forums, an excellent group of like minded folks on a particular breeder’s / Seedbank’s Discord forum, or from among your own IG followers is a crucial step that a lot of breeders skip – I’m looking at you Cookie Fam – the Candy Rain drop was a disaster, even if some people received excellent plants in their packs. I had a pack of 19 seeds that didn’t even germinate. Yikes. That’s some serious negligence on the part of the seed maker. But yeah. So often the genetics released as one offs are grown / bred out of existence within a few years, so making F2s isn’t only good for your own personal breeding projects, but helps to preserve what are very often extremely limited edition genetics / releases, the true value of which are often not widely recognized for awhile.