First Question From Interested Novice

OK guys, Iv been reading up a little on the various posts in this forum (Breeders Paradise) and am really interested in the techniques used, and one day Id like to try seed production for myself. But there is one question that I keep asking myself. To make my point, I d like to invent a little hypothetical scenario......

You have 2 strains, lets say a short Indica or perhaps even a Ruderalis, which produces low potency MJ. Then you have a high growing Sativa which delivers knock out cerebral highs. You decide to cross them to try and produce a short plant that delivers knock-out pot.

My question is.... how do you avoid producing a high growing plant that produces low potency pot???

Steve

It's a long process from what I've read. You need to grow-out multiple variants and then back-breed the best with the original, then repeat until you have a plant which produces seeds which predominantly display the traits you are after.
Selective breeding means that you don't know which will be tall and low potency or vice versa...you select the good variants and cull the rubbish. Then you pollinate back to the original mother. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. It takes quite a while to grow-out the generations needed to make a stable hybrid.

I haven't done it, but I've read a bit about it. So some details may not be quite right...

You make hundreds, if not thousands of hybrids. You then remove the undesirable plants, and continue breeding , just keep it up until you get what you want.

thanks for that guys. i was hoping that there might be some magic formula, like using the female with the height characteristics, with the male (or hermie) with the potency characteristics, and that would work.

Its obviously not that simple, but it would be nice if females tended toward certain tendancies and male tended toward the other??? Hope this makes sense!!

It all comes down to the strains used, the likenesses or variances in the strains. In some crosses the male will be more dominate in the outcome and others the females. There is no silver bullet at this point to know how the genetic codes are going to line-up. Someday we may have enough research done into the gnome to have a better clue as to what to expect. Of course, this is where the fun is, see what you have created and finding those phenos that are so precious and potent. Good Luck, learn patience and you will have years of enjoyment.

It seems like, at this point, nobody's been able to grow something that smokes like a killer haze, but grows like a ruderalis or an easy, indoor, fast Indica. That's kinda a holy grail IMO, because people want to smoke sativas, but they don't want to grow 'em indoors. Seems like it's kinda hard to isolate potency or high THC/low CBD from other traits. Most indica phenos give you an indica high, and likewise with sativas.

I'm sure it can be done. Legendary legal plant breeder Luther Burbank would sometimes use samples as high as 500,000 plants and cull everything out and just go for what he wanted-out of half-a-million plants. If any pot breeder could work with half a million plants at one time, things would probably be moving faster.