Hi Everyone,
If I get a separate male from say a big bud strain and collect the pollen to pollinate my Feminized Northern Lights Blue strain or Humboldt strain... will I end up with feminized seeds?
In a word, no.
Crossing an ordinary male with a female plant grown from a feminized seed won't yield feminized seeds.
The way to get feminized seeds is to take pollen from the male flowers of a hermaphroditic female plant and cross it with a female plant (perhaps even the same one). In effect by sexually crossing two female plants (one with male parts), you ensure that all of the offspring will be female too.
If you don't have a hermaphroditic plant, its possible to artificially force any female plant to become hermaphroditic by applying either colloidal silver, gibberellic acid or another similar compound. This is how the professional breeders usually make their own feminized seeds. You can read about exactly how to do this elsewhere.
Sick of keep buying seeds and dont have 2 rooms to clone and want to go perpetual...
Any advice greatly appreciated
OK, first of all, clones are tiny, and it doesn't take a whole room to maintain a large number of them. You can easily put nine rooting clones in a square foot, meaning you could easily maintain 20 of them in an area the size of a small shelf or box if you wanted to. Clones also don't require much light; most people just use ordinary cheap tube fluorescents or CFLs. The point is, maintaining clones may not be as hard as you think it is, particularly if you only need a small number of them.
In terms of seeds, if you just cross any two plants just ONE time, you should end up with literally hundreds of seeds, potentially enough to last you for years if you only grow a few plants at at a time. This is easy and cheap enough to do that I think it might be worth the extra effort of having to pick out the males after planting them (rather than trying to create feminized seeds). You don't even have to fertilize ("waste") an entire female plant; you can just dab pollen from one kept male on a few branches to create dozens to hundreds of seeds if you like. In fact, you can keep the male in the form of a small "stud" clone or just tiny plant separate from your female plants, so you won't run the risk of accidentally pollinating your entire crop, nor require much space/energy to maintain the male.
Now, as to breeding, if you were to do a cross with two similar true-breeding strains (eg Northern lights x Northern lights), the offspring should all be similar to the parents, and their offspring similar, and so on. So if you started with ordinary seeds of a recognized true breeding strain, and crossed a male and a female, you'd create many more genetically similar plants. Once you used up most of your seeds, you could repeat the cross with any male and female, and create hundreds more, etc.
If you did a cross with DIFFERENT strains, like the Fem Northern lights x Big Bud example you mentioned above, the first generation of offspring would be a hybrid strain, with all offspring similar to one another and sharing traits from each parent. You'd probably end up with something "good," though as a first generation hybrid it wouldn't be stable. Specifically, if you were to cross THOSE offspring one with another, you'd likely end up with a wild assortment of phenotypes as the genes from the two original NL&BB parents were assorted randomly through the second generation cross.
But unless you were trying to create a new line/strain with traits from each of your two original plants, this wouldn't really matter. If all you wanted was a number of viable seeds to keep growing, you could stop after the first cross, and when you eventually used up all those seeds, start again with two new true-breeding parents to create hundreds more seeds, etc.
If you really wanted to create something new with what you considered to be the most desirable traits of two individual parents, you'd probably have to pick through literally dozens, if not hundreds of individual plants to find the ones that had all the traits you wanted to pass on. Then you have to repeat this cycle of selection multiple times (at least 5, though with fewer plants) to create a stabilized (ie true-breeding) line.
This is why serious breeding projects are beyond the scope of most hobby or home growers. Unless you have the ability to grow out 50 or more plants at a time for selection over multiple generations, and the ability to do it in a disciplined and organized way taking copious notes and maintaining clones of each plant for further crossing, you can't really do the best possible work.
Fortunately, its relatively easy to get excellent genetics where all of this hard work was already done by breeders in the past!
