Rasterman
In Bloom
I thought a good breeding shortcut would be to breed cannabis without using males, ever. I asked around some and was told that doing that, eventually you'll run into problems because the male passes on genes that females need. Because females eventually become sterile. Because breeding without males will eventually create a cultivar with strong intersex tendencies.
None of those things sounds logical to me, but that's the wisdom. I recently canceled an open pollination because all of my seeds (at least the ones I didn't cull) came out female and you can't get good genetics without males.
Then Twenty20 Mendocino admitted that's what they do. (Read the comments section):
I did another web search and couldn't find squat. But I did find a single podcast discussing the topic:
. Skip to minute 70 for the discussion.
It validated what seems to me to make sense. Males are irrelevant, and problematic, when growing drug cannabis. There might be some genetics passed through part of one male chromosome, but if the ladies being bred together are both fine specimens with desired traits, their genetic material will combine as expected. If some necessary trait was passed only through male chromosomes, it would certainly make feminized seeds a crap shoot.
For home growers with a plant count limit, this is good news. No need to grow out males and hang onto their clones until their children can be examined and compared with children of other males, for example. No false starts and resets because the chosen male was the wrong one.
So I say kill all the males, pick the best females and breed your own IBL in the most efficient way possible. It's what Twenty20 does, and I've grown some of their stuff, so why not?
Thoughts?
None of those things sounds logical to me, but that's the wisdom. I recently canceled an open pollination because all of my seeds (at least the ones I didn't cull) came out female and you can't get good genetics without males.
Then Twenty20 Mendocino admitted that's what they do. (Read the comments section):
I did another web search and couldn't find squat. But I did find a single podcast discussing the topic:
. Skip to minute 70 for the discussion.
It validated what seems to me to make sense. Males are irrelevant, and problematic, when growing drug cannabis. There might be some genetics passed through part of one male chromosome, but if the ladies being bred together are both fine specimens with desired traits, their genetic material will combine as expected. If some necessary trait was passed only through male chromosomes, it would certainly make feminized seeds a crap shoot.
For home growers with a plant count limit, this is good news. No need to grow out males and hang onto their clones until their children can be examined and compared with children of other males, for example. No false starts and resets because the chosen male was the wrong one.
So I say kill all the males, pick the best females and breed your own IBL in the most efficient way possible. It's what Twenty20 does, and I've grown some of their stuff, so why not?
Thoughts?
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