Little tiny seed plants...cool. Hey Al...could you tell us how you selected the males? That's an area I need to improve upon.
JD
I do a kind of purging. Instead selecting what male I want, what I do is to "unselect" and kill the ones I don't. There is a reason for that: the only way to really know what a male delivers is to grow his children, and anything else is speculation.
There is a "proper" way that consists in taking cuts of the males and letting them flower up to the end. After that, you can analyze the bud structure, the resin, smell, production, whatever, and make conclusions to choose the most productive, aromatic, the one with denser flower clusters, etc. This way you couldn't tell what the male will deliver in terms of THC and terpenes , but you'd get a approximation somehow.
This "proper" way needs a lot of time and resources. I don't have time for any of that. For the first step I just
cull all the males I don't like (unhealthy, slow, mutant, asymmetric, etc).
Then I look for strength. Color. Smell. Branches, symmetry, health, good behavior, harmony, beauty. And, most than anything, diversity. So I usually end up with several full flowering males, and I use several of them.
The way I do it, the most important thing is to use several different ones. That's how you get diversity. And the risk of using a "bad" male dilutes when you use several. You can get bad males, but there will be some that will be the ones you want. Then in the next generation you can test and choose which seeds from which male are the best, and keep working with the selected parents.
It takes time, but breeding does.
Cheers