Pollination, what do I need to know?

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
I've been pollen chucking for about 20 years now and there's lots of ways to skin this cat.

Easiest is to put a male in with the girls, supply good air circulation and let nature take it's course. That will get you a shit-ton of seeds but the yield and potency of the bud will suffer greatly.

I cut a few bendy branches off a male plant and put them in a jar of water so they droop over and drop their pollen and dead flowers on a sheet of tin foil. All you need is a small flowering light like a 23W - 2700K CFL or something similar on a timer for 12/12. Can set it up in a cardboard box in a closet somewhere far away from your plants. I use a 180micron screen that I also use for making dry sift to run the pollen through into the collection pan. That cleans out all the tiny bits of flower that are moist and you don't want moisture in your pollen. Then I scoop it up into a vial and put the open vial into a sealed jar with some colour changing drying crystals called Drierite for a few days then seal up the vial and store it in that jar. Starts blue then goes pink when it's absorbed all the moisture it can. Then you bake it in a toaster oven or regular oven at about 450F for a half hour to dry it out and turn it blue again. Can do the same with white rice that's been heated for a while to dry it out more too.

Then I just take the female I want to make seeds with at about 3 weeks flower. Take it out of the grow room, put a garbage bag over all but the one branch I want to pollinate and use a Q-Tip or tiny paint brush to dust the buds on that branch. I leave it in the shop overnight then spray everything including that branch down with water to deactivate and loose pollen and believe me there will be lots of loose pollen you can't even see. Spray the bag good, the pot it's in, all over the branch and the floor all around the pot.

If you want you can do the same thing to another branch with different pollen to get another strain off the same plant. I had 5 on one big girl once. Different coloured twist ties or some other method of identifying which branch got which pollen and write it all down where you can find it too! Right now I have a fem auto hi-CBD girl with 2 small lower branches done with different pollen. One is from 2 males of the same strain and the other is from an auto fem that came up male of a hi-THC strain. can see seeds cracking the calyxes now.

When the plant is ripe and ready for harvest you just go ahead and chop all but the branches with seeds ripening if they aren't done yet. You'll see them splitting the calyxes and some could even fall out on their own. Then you can just take each branch off one at a time and trim the buds up a bit and put them in paper bags to dry out for a week or so then take them out and crumble to get the seeds. Don't forget to mark the bags with the crosses info too so they don't get mixed up.

This year I'm getting into making my own fem seeds using Silver ThioSulfate aka STS. Made my own silver nitrate with a .9999 8g silver coin and about 20ml of boiling concentrated nitric acid. Wear your PPE for this one and do it ouside as it produces a cloud of bright orange fumes that will fry your eyes, sinus' and lungs. Good old NOx that turns into nitric acid when it finds moisture like inside of you. lol I bought the sodium thiosulfate from a chem supply back east in Ontario. $22 for 500g and $69 for Purolator to get it to me as it goes as dangerous goods and Canada Post won't deliver such.

That's about it. Now I'm going to save a copy of this for the next grower that asks the same question and save a lot of thinking and typing. Not so easy when you're hitting the Hindu Kush pretty hard on a Friday night. LOL

That's my sift screen on the bottom right. A BlueBerry male donating his dust.

View attachment 4660972

Making AgNO3

View attachment 4660973

The finished product. 12g from 8g of silver. A small piece of the coin left over.

View attachment 4660974

Happy chuckin'!

:peace:
The red cloud of joy

I can smell it

(Duvall voice)
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
So I've got my pollen box made with a 23w mini grow fluorescent tube light on a 12/12 timer.

I broke off a piece of the suspected male a week or so ago, set it in water to root and I decided to see if it's male.

Now it's in the box, let's see what the sex is in a few days.
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
So I've got my pollen box made with a 23w mini grow fluorescent tube light on a 12/12 timer.

I broke off a piece of the suspected male a week or so ago, set it in water to root and I decided to see if it's male.

Now it's in the box, let's see what the sex is in a few days.
It may not root in water but could. I'd change the water out every day or two. If I wanted to root a male cutting I'd do it like usual with a dip in gel and powder then into a pot.

Should work to get it to show sex at the very least. If the bottom of the stem crusts over just snip off a bit to open the end up again or it will start drying up.

Got started on my cloning by accident. I put a tarp under the plant yesterday when it was raining and just went out to take it up an hour ago and I guess a lower branch got caught under it and broke off when I moved the tarp. Grabbed my new cloning gel and a pot of the ProMix I had already mixed up from my last repotting job and have it in the dome under the fluoros. The branch I took it off would have looked like a decent plant in a small pot it was so big. Hope it roots but I’m still going to get a couple smaller cuttings and need to get some others too from some other plants.

A good 4" with 2 nodes under the soil. Got it under a 6" dome.

EarthLoverOutdoor25082010pm.JPG

:peace:
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
It may not root in water but could. I'd change the water out every day or two. If I wanted to root a male cutting I'd do it like usual with a dip in gel and powder then into a pot.

Should work to get it to show sex at the very least. If the bottom of the stem crusts over just snip off a bit to open the end up again or it will start drying up.

Got started on my cloning by accident. I put a tarp under the plant yesterday when it was raining and just went out to take it up an hour ago and I guess a lower branch got caught under it and broke off when I moved the tarp. Grabbed my new cloning gel and a pot of the ProMix I had already mixed up from my last repotting job and have it in the dome under the fluoros. The branch I took it off would have looked like a decent plant in a small pot it was so big. Hope it roots but I’m still going to get a couple smaller cuttings and need to get some others too from some other plants.

A good 4" with 2 nodes under the soil. Got it under a 6" dome.

View attachment 4665116

:peace:
...again...me with coffee and a phone and you brightening up my morning.

The stick it in water method has to have been around for ever. I learned it from Gramma and Mom and it's pretty close to foolproof. It does take forever and a day to grow roots but they do come in.

Cutting in a cup of water, stick in a window for two weeks.

(wanders off to stalk and hunt the sacred beast of the morning; Cup'a'Kawfee)
 

CannaOnerStar

Well-Known Member
The flowers will mature then open up and drop pollen on to the foil so I let it go until I figure I have sufficient pollen then screen to clean it and put it in the vials. Sometimes the ends in the water crust over so I just slice off a bit to keep them able to draw up water. I use a mix of tap and RO water for then so sit in.

Some of the flowers on those are just starting to split but none have dropped pollen yet but would in a day or two more so I just chopped down the male yesterday and saved those branches for the pollen. They are in the spare bedroom with no other plants around and no fans going.

View attachment 4662676

Trying to pick off ripe sacs to keep a male around flowering girls is a losing game so once they start swelling and usually changing colour to light green/yellow they are ready to bust a nut and got to go. I've used one or two 23W CFLs to let them finish like thse ones and it works fine. They don't need a lot of light or any nutes as they can't use nutes without roots.

:peace:
Okay thanks. I have this guy just starting to flower :) I saw that some flower was pushing out 5 days ago, but wasnt quite certain it was a male until 2 days ago and 100% sure until today. Ill try that trick of yours on it. I guess ill cut the main stem like that but leave some lower branches alive in case i fuck up.

DSC02471.JPG

And yes i know its a bit skinny on the bottom, but thats because there was not enough(at all) wind blowing through it. The stretch is not because of lack of light either and i like that, especially when combined with decent branching. I did have some fungus gnats on it when it was young, and it seemed to start a bit slow, dunno if that effected it. But I have identical phenotype that has not started flowering yet(which is why i suspect its a female) and two shorter less branchy phenos. This male the the identical hopefully female would be ideal for what im going for. Something that would grow big outdoors guerrilla style.

Its low ryder x matanuska tundra(mixed to F3), then crossed with wedding cake auto.

I only got to grow two males of the matanuska tundra low ryder and one was over 10 years ago. They also were big before they started to flower, father of this started to flower about one internode later than autos usually do and was noticeably bigger, but grew to that size super fast and im sure would had grown very big if i would had let it.
 
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OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
...again...me with coffee and a phone and you brightening up my morning.

The stick it in water method has to have been around for ever. I learned it from Gramma and Mom and it's pretty close to foolproof. It does take forever and a day to grow roots but they do come in.

Cutting in a cup of water, stick in a window for two weeks.

(wanders off to stalk and hunt the sacred beast of the morning; Cup'a'Kawfee)
Mom used to do that with cuttings too. She's 93 today and still has a garden going. Got to remember to call her once I get some sleep. Just after 3:30am so she could be up. lol

I keep my cuttings under lower light for the first week or so. They will try to veg if the light's too strong and you want them using their built in energy to produce roots.

I have a bubble cloner but still like rooting in ProMix.

:peace:
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
Okay thanks. I have this guy just starting to flower :) I saw that some flower was pushing out 5 days ago, but wasnt quite certain it was a male until 2 days ago and 100% sure until today. Ill try that trick of yours on it. I guess ill cut the main stem like that but leave some lower branches alive in case i fuck up.

View attachment 4665824

And yes i know its a bit skinny on the bottom, but thats because there was not enough(at all) wind blowing through it. The stretch is not because of lack of light either and i like that, especially when combined with decent branching. I did have some fungus gnats on it when it was young, and it seemed to start a bit slow, dunno if that effected it. But I have identical phenotype that has not started flowering yet(which is why i suspect its a female) and two shorter less branchy phenos. This male the the identical hopefully female would be ideal for what im going for. Something that would grow big outdoors guerrilla style.

Its low ryder x matanuska tundra(mixed to F3), then crossed with wedding cake auto.

I only got to grow two males of the matanuska tundra low ryder and one was over 10 years ago. They also were big before they started to flower, father of this started to flower about one internode later than autos usually do and was noticeably bigger, but grew to that size super fast and im sure would had grown very big if i would had let it.
You can keep a father plant too if you want. Flip the male back to veg and take cuttings that you can flower for some fresh pollen when you want it. Not with autos tho of course. :)

:peace:
 

spliffendz

Well-Known Member
Right, instead of open pollination I changed my mind and bagged the chosen branch, sprayed the whole plant down, removed bag, brushed pollen, now just sitting chilling for a couple of hours before I add them back to their dungeon
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
@OldMedUser Also used your method of cutting the male branches and leaving them in water overhanging a plastic sheet, thanks ;)
No problem. My boy branches are putting out good and I'll probably collect the pollen in a day or two. When I pollinate a branch I bag the whole plant except the target branch then use a q-tip to dust the buds on it. Leave it overnight then spray everything down good and take the bag off. Twist tie on the branch so I know what is what especially if doing more than one strain on the same plant.

I'd use plain paper or tin foil rather than plastic to catch the pollen on. Plastic can be all static and hold on to the pollen. Parchment baking paper works really good too.

:peace:
 

Omkarananda

Well-Known Member
So happy to see this thread and to be able to share and learn from other growers, especially with experience like @OldMedUser! Really grateful! Making your own seeds is definitely a lot cheaper than buying breeder packs, and it’s how I’m slowly weaning myself from buying seeds :eyesmoke: Here’s a little Peanut Butter Breath male that I’m getting pollen from, laid down on parchment paper, then I’ll take a q tip and pollinate some pbb females to make f2’s. I also have just checked a bud on a pbb female seeded with a different pbb male that I had outdoors and she did make seeds so I should have a bunch. And I have another pbb male (that’s my favorite...best looking structure) for after this one with several different pbb females. So three males just to increase the odds for success. I’ve done a little breeding with another male (Soulmate) and to me it’s really rewarding to take part in the beautiful process of life. Happy growing everyone :peace:924CE97C-A115-49A0-95DE-11C14091C377.jpegand good luck chuckin!
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
Thanks for the kind words but even tho I've been pollen-chucking for almost 20 years I'm still very nOObish when it comes to breeding for real target outcomes.

Using multiple males to get seeds of the same strains is a great plan. Then you are assured that you have a larger range of genetic expression and in your search for the best line of that strain you have more to choose from. I have a couple of old strains I love so every 5 years or so I'll grow out a few of each and breed some new seeds just to keep those genes available.

It's the choosing that is the hard part. Kind of being like a wine snob. Picking out all those subtle nuances that different terpene profiles give a glass of wine is like selecting plants to breed with others. During veg I use clean hands to rub the main stem then smell my finger tips to get the aroma. Two plants with different different hands then go wash hands again with a neutral soap like Ivory. If you get the same smells you like from both a male and female then cross them to get even more of the same from more of their offspring.

Don't automatically reject a plant just because it doesn't grow as big or happily like others. Sometimes those weirder ones hold traits that lead to better strains. I remember reading about that a decade ago at least and try to think of that when I'm pheno hunting. Always aiming for the largest and most robust plants leads you to degradation of the strain that same article explained. I'm pretty sure it was from SubCool but I've read thousands of articles the last 40+ years so it's hard to keep track. lol

:peace:
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
Right on @xtsho ! I'm just about to collect the pollen from the so-called fem auto plant that turned out to be a regular male I had in my outdoor garden this summer. Not sure yet if his sperm is worth saving but I have seeds from his family that may yet yield something worth keeping.

LocoBoyPollen.JPG

:peace:
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
I have the pollen, I have the bud site I want to pollinate.

I'm also having reservations about my skill level in doing this.

This one action could benefit me or fuck up the whole grow.

How do I segregate a pollinated branch when I have 10x the recommended air flow in my tiny tent?
 
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