la resistance verte
Member
nice,nice
Beautiful flowers grown beautifully. Nice job. How's the smoke?
I recently heard someone advice to "keep all your clones until all your jars are empty" and I quite liked that advice. Not always possible but if it is, it probably should be followed.
I notice a lot of changing going on. The plants have cured for a good 6 weeks now and things are still changing dramatically, not only from smells/flavors but also from effect/potency.
What I'm trying to say is: Don't judge till the jars are empty and till everything had its time to cure and you were able to sample everything several times and make up your final mind.
I think it is good to start with WAY more mothers than you can handle and kill the ones you don't like - for whatever reason. Selection is about a lot more than just potency - it is a personal thing.
If you could only handle 10 mothers and only started with 10 mothers you won't get as good a plant as if you started with 22 mothers and killed 12 of them because of aroma and resin and yield and bud/leaf ratio and if it falls within the phenotype criteria you wanted
If you like 50% of the phenos and you start with 10 mothers you will only have 5 you like...if you start with 22 mothers and select 10 from the pheno you like you are doing twice as well.
Agreed. It only makes sense to pop the entire seed pack (18). Popping 4 seeds from a seed pack is a waste of time IMO, as it severely restricts the possibilities of expression. Once I grok’d that seeds were inexpensive and it didn’t take that much more time to launch them all, selection became more fun and rewarding.
Of course, when the time comes, culling your babies takes courage. Second guessing doesn’t help, discipline and objectivity is required. Emotion and attachment to certain plants happens though. I suggest you get over that.
Once you have made a purchase decision on a particular variety, don’t be shy- jump in with both feet, commit and you will be amply rewarded.
Cool runnings
M
I agree that selecting 40+ seeds would ensure you find really good smoke in every grow. Believe me, I'd love to do it but I can't flower any more than a half pack of seeds at a time while remaining legal. As a hobbyist and non-commercial grower, being able to select from 4-8 female plants of a given strain is all the selection I can do without getting a Tier I cultivation license license and grow up to 1,000 sf of canopy. I'm just not interested in that.
All I can add to this from experience is that from 50 seeds started and 21 females flowered out so far there was one in there that was definitely unique. I have about 8 more females to flower out from that seed pop but there were definitely phenotypes that are slightly different but mostly similar.
There is a group of about 4-6 females that exhibit some form of berry or red-fruit terps and somewhat candy like and another group of 4-5 that are more in the musky area and a hand full that were slightly citrusy.
The one that stood out from all of them was in the citrusy/woody direction but regarding yield, growth structure and overall resistance to abuse/suboptimal conditions, there was no other like it.
Regarding frost/resin production, there was 1 more plant that equals it and it is the best out of the berry/red fruit terp corner. These 2 clearly stood out while one of them had "peers" (other phenos that stood out through their berry/red fruit terps) while the other had none.
There was another unique pheno, the most skunk leaning I believe. It was the quickest in terms of vegging vigor and also the quickest to deplete all nutrients from the leafs and turn full yellow, weeks before others.
I think that pheno wants a lot more nitrogen than all the others and didn't have enough in its pot. Trying to run that one again with proper nute levels and it could be the third one that stands out.
But I doubt I would have noticed all of this if I had just popped a 12 pack...
I understand and agree that plant numbers are often a limiting factor and I would never say that you can't select unless you pop X beans.
Yet I agree with the assessment that for "proper" selection, a certain number is required. What that number is, I don't know. It depends on the breeder and the strain I suppose?
I asked a breeder once how many beans of his strain I should pop to find that one particular pheno he is advertising and he said about 30 should ensure that I find it. I think that is a decent number to pheno hunt but more would always be better imho. As many as possible, if you pheno hunt, is what I would summarize this ...
Another thought on the topic:
Currently, you do have to go through potentially hundreds of seeds to find that 1 special plant. Some would argue that is because cannabis breeding is not refined to the point of vegetables or fruits where if you pop 10 seeds, you guaranteed to find just that type of tomato plant that the breeder advertised.
Instead you will only potentially find the phenotype advertised in 10 seeds but potentially could need 30 or 50 or even hundreds.
Now imagine a few years in the future. Imagine we have "successfully" bottlenecked various cannabis strains to the point where tomatoes etc. are and every 10, scratch that every 3 or 5 beans you pop will result in several plants that are exactly what the breeder described, they are all that one pheno.
At that point, we would no longer have to pop "only" 30 or 50 or hundreds of beans. At that point, the gene pool will be so bottlenecked that to find an anomaly/a truly special/different phenotype, we might have to pop thousands upon thousands of seeds.
And if the bottlenecking has gone far enough, even popping a hundred thousand won't yield a holy grail or whatever pheno.
Catch my drift?
We should be grateful over the current state of things.
Would it be nicer if we could pop a 12 pack and were guaranteed to have that holy grail phenotype at least once in there? Sure it would be.
But don't forget that will come at a cost as well and if your holy grail pheno is another, you might not be able to find it anymore no matter how hard you try because the necessary genetics were bred out of that seedline.
Right now, you can though and we should be happy about that.
I would much rather be where we are with cannabis than be where we are with tomatoes.
You can change the laws so people can pop more beans but it would be much harder or impossible to change the genepool in retrospect once it has been bottlenecked so you don't have to pop that many seeds to begin with.
Yeah the thing with cannabis is unique regarding the gene pool, bottlenecking etc.
I agree with you that Sativas have moved somewhat out of range for the average consumers. I lived for close to a decade in the Netherlands and not once got a true Sativa. EVER.
Know what I mean?
If it really was Northern lights, it should have been a pure indica or something close.