Breeding strategies, common practice and hybrid vigor

hey everyone.

I am curious about the strategies that you utilize, as hobby breeders to get some progress and not fuck your germaplasm up.

From what i read - 1 breeding pair in each gen, down into ibl, select select, select.

Buuuut - surelly the vigor must go down the toilet at some point. I would guess about f4, but do not have experiences - I welcome your observations

You could obviously than cross again, (even with lets say f1 seed - so you stay inside chosen genetics) but it irks me, that than in fact you never have a strain - I am willing to understand the term widelly, but certainly the one thing "strain" must mean is that it puts out plants somehow more similar to each other than to those outside the strain and at the same time can be continued through time.
Seems very weird that a populace, that is doomed to degenerate after next 2gen should be called a strain (variations of hybrid Fs is not degeneration).

One solution is to keep two ibl lines and cross them in some intervals. Not a long time solution though. This is of course a theoretical question. In practice people will cross the shit out of everything, so not really an issue.

Somebody attempts syntetical populations? Wider bottlenecks?


Lets say, that we decide how many parents we are gonna keep. How do you maximize your efectivity at selecting? The selection on general growth wigor at seedling stage is obvious. What about breeding dwarfed plants to judge smell? Stress test with mold inoculation? Drought, hot and cold stress tests? Breeding for specific led light output? I read that plants tolerant to hotness also tolerate cold temps, that this tolerance is general to wider temp range. True? What is the highest density of plants you tried for selecting which trait that worked for you? What about growing many plants in big flat containers, can you see the root growth vigor in this way (most vigorous push less vigorous and grow bigger)? What about acclimating plants for outdoor? Anyone tried direct sowing to guerilla locations? Is it possible, have you found genetics that performs well in this setup? Anyone able to breed pest resistence over time to pests not being an issue (mostly curious about slugs)? Do you have a friend who is a long time hippie grower / breeder (we do not in europe)? how does he keep his strains?

Also do you have an experience at choosing a strategy that backfired?

What about autos, since you cannot keep moms, I assume that anyone regularly growing autos who has half a brain (my pespective - possibly I have half a brain) also does some breeding (pollen chucking IS a breeding strategy and has to be respected). Experiences with lines kept past f5? Any interesting recessive traits showing up? Auto x regular bred to full auto in f3?

I am sorry for such a broad topic thread, but I found in general the info availeble barely scratches the surface, again and again. In am tired of reading for the nth time about the most basic stuff.

You know some facts and you have some sources, the theory has some underlying mendelian logic. By providing these, you are doing a good thing for the comunity. There is no need to argue. Let your facts, sources and logic speak for themselves.

I'm into open pollination

Do you rouge? How many parents? Do you test the seeded buds to select for potency? How many generations are behind your current stuff? Progress? Some trics you found yourself?

I've just finished doing an open pollination using a blueberry male and crossing it to a shiva skunk, great white shark, skunk 1 and an old school mango. I admit i only used 2 packs to find the male and only one pack of each of the others to find suitable females. I grew out all the females from each strain, taking cuttings from each prior to flowering and then chose the mothers to cross with that had the traits i desired. Some showed numerous traits, some only showed 1 or 2. Im preparing to start the back crossing as we speak back to the original mothers and some to the original father. No real tricks to my techniques, just time and a bit of cash.

Thank for the reply. That is in fact very interesting. I guess you chose the strains because none of them should be F1 hybrids, so the backcrossing makes sense. I guess your goal here would be having a 75 % cheese plant (keeping the potency?) with added benefits of other plants (?). After the first backcross, will you do selections in bigger numbers to stabilize? Do you have some specific goals, or is your aim just an overall nice plant?

Thanks again. Best of luck.

Oldow said:

Do you have some specific goals

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I think this is partly your answer. Strategies might change depending on your goals.
Say I got a pack of seeds, and just don't want to purchase again, pop the whole pack, choose the best male(there is a lot of articles about choosing a male), let it pollinate the females, bam, ton of seeds(f2s?). Maybe make a few test crosses in the process and collect pollen for future use.
If your goal is to make something unique and stable, then like your first post there might be a few things to consider. Space is usually my main concern.
I did read a cool tech somewhere along the way; collect pollen from a number of different strains, mix the pollens in equal parts and fertilize, choose the plants that best fit your desired goals in the next generation to breed.
I've never had the space to try that one but sounds fun, not sure what it's called.

Good luck

Oldow said:

Thank for the reply. That is in fact very interesting. I guess you chose the strains because none of them should be F1 hybrids, so the backcrossing makes sense. I guess your goal here would be having a 75 % cheese plant (keeping the potency?) with added benefits of other plants (?). After the first backcross, will you do selections in bigger numbers to stabilize? Do you have some specific goals, or is your aim just an overall nice plant?

Thanks again. Best of luck.

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Yes and no mate, i chose the blueberry as it is almost considered homogenous but still shows some variation. The others yes, they were chosen as they are consistent hybrids which in my experience have only shown a few different pheno's making it somewhat easier to find what i was looking for. The potency i got from the male (couchlock, sedating stone) and was looking for branching, resin content, flowering time and taste in the females. The shiva skunk and GWS had all 4 and the skunk and mango showed 2 of the 4 i was after, i the taste and flowering time i sacrificed in the skunk to get potency and branching in the hope of easier scrogging
The mango had a ridiculous amount of resin and a smell of perfectly ripe mangos so im really looking forward to her offspring. So yeah i had goals in mind and was extremely lucky to find most traits i was looking for
After the back crossing i will be inbreeding as many as possible to try and isolate the traits a bit further but that is down the track a bit!

My plan is to use fairly large bonsai selections (50-100 plants/run) to find mothers and work on inbreeding lines to cross to create hybrids. Whenever I'm making seeds I'll be crossing the reversed female with every good female I fit in the tent to get random other seeds as well as the desired cross.

Great idea mate, bonsai is exactly how i did mine, easier to manage and you can get a lot more in a tent to help with choosing!

I figure if I use screens to support them I don't really need to rely on root mass to support the plants so I can flower freshly rooted clones with a high plant density in a flood system. I'll need to flood like every 90 minutes with the lights on but it'll be doable. I bet I can do 50 plants in a 4x2 space under T5s and get enough from each plant to get a decent sample for me and for testing to pick a winner. 50 plants should let me find an outstanding plant with the growth characteristics I want.

MrEDuck said:

I figure if I use screens to support them I don't really need to rely on root mass to support the plants so I can flower freshly rooted clones with a high plant density in a flood system. I'll need to flood like every 90 minutes with the lights on but it'll be doable. I bet I can do 50 plants in a 4x2 space under T5s and get enough from each plant to get a decent sample for me and for testing to pick a winner. 50 plants should let me find an outstanding plant with the growth characteristics I want.

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you say clones but 50 clones is all the same, ... you would have to grow 50 seeds not clones .. my plants get pretty big 12/12 from seeds I doubt you could fit in 25 plants from seed in 4x2

There is so much I would like to discuss. Its such a broad topic, because, as staink says, it's a lot about goals, what you expect.

So first of all, I recomend this book, it was really an inspiration and a great source of info to me:
http://www.amazon.com/Breed-Your-Own-Vegetable-Varieties/dp/1890132721

its not particullarly usefull for our niche, but its a great book nontheless. The technique, where you cross a buttload of diferent strains and then toss out what you do not like is a legit strategy used mainly with outbreeders, like corn, or our favorite herb. It's discussede there also.



When goals are discussed, most people just imagine a great overall plant and for that, obviously, you need a lot of space and for that you have to sacrifice. Breeding strategies are mostly about saving time and space. Anyone could grow in thousands and produce nice seeds. Breeding in restricted conditions necesitates intelect. Like fighting when overpovered. You need a strategy.

Many would say its not even worth it. I do not have enough experience to prove that it is. But I hope so.

ok, eastcoastmo, let me try to break it down, correct me, where I am wrong. And I know I am prolly wrong, its just that I really want to understand, so sorry:

we assume, that we work with stable varieties. We are preparing ourselves for backcrossing. In my understanding, backrossing makes sense, if the recurrent parent is stable and has most of the desirable traits. Backcrossing to unstable means the result is still unstable. Each of our Bx gens has to be large enough that we will find the donor trait. So the fewest traits we try to pass to the recurrent parent, the easier.

All of our varieties are in principle nice and valuable, we do not have to shoot 100% accuratelly. We are trying to pass the potency of the father variety to the desirable varieties of the mother clones. So we need polen that carries the potency. This cannot be easilly seen in males. We could now backcross a few times and than grow out a bigger sample in hopes that we get the now fewer genes for potency from the cheese. Since potency is (prolly mosly) quantitative trait, it will never be really on the level of donor strain. Or we could get some polen from reversed females, store it, process the buds, sample, pollinate with the good pollen. But like this, we just threw the xy chromosome out the window. Or we could backcross, grow out, select most potent female, pollinate by brother, backcross... This is time consuming and weird.

Once again, sorry for my noobishness, but this is not obvious to me. I am prolly missing something.

Also there is the question of stabilization. Are you doing anything to prevent bottlenecks and inbreeding depression? Or is your plan to find a nice mother around f3 - f5 and never go further?

mrEDuck:
limiting growth is a good idea. Will you try just by cutting? You could limit the space for rootmass or play with ferts in veg to get plants of desired size. I did not understand fully, how you plan to get your inbred lines. I assume, that you will have lets say three lines. In each run you will run just one, do a full sib cross to get lightly seeded bud, test the buds to find out the best female, then the second line, than the third and than the first again, with the seeds of a selected female and so on. Seems cool to me. We might find something easier though, sounds time consuming. But then again, I just prolly misunderstood you. How you plan to choose the one plant to reverse? Growth characteristics?

Greensanta:
I think you are right with the clones. But with the density, this is the first thing I would like to try to find out for sure. I think that for some goals and purposes, you could even fit more in. Think about choosing the most trichomy genes for the resin lover. If you are trying to get an IBL of superior trichome production, you do not really need the plant to grow huge. Big enough space that it is not sick is enough. I will find out, if limiting the container, or the nutes, or just cut it is the way. This info, imho, would be very valuable. But then still, if we get our answer, we still need to find out how a plant excelling in small containers will behave in regular ones.

As I am thinking about this more and more, it seems to me, that most practical would be, to devote some work to develop one stable variety that has most of the tricky characteristics and performs well under your setup. Good branching, vigor, resistances, rooting, tolerances. Get it really stable and dependant and then use its males as recurents in backcrossing to get other nice traits from elsewhere.

And yeah - I like theorizing. I know some people consider it overcomplicating things, but i like the thinking itself. If you want to weigh in, thx.

GreenSanta said:

you say clones but 50 clones is all the same, ... you would have to grow 50 seeds not clones .. my plants get pretty big 12/12 from seeds I doubt you could fit in 25 plants from seed in 4x2

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take a clone from each phenotype (seed plant) and flower out that clone once it has rooted this keeps them smaller and with a more mature root system from the clone
in any-case you can snip off any growth you like from the clones and keep them tiny , all that is required is a decent size nug from each clone to test each pheno ,
i do not think i would have a problem doing this in a 4x2 space

peace

You make a lot of sense Oldow, and basically what you say is how ive planned it. The back crossing is to keep the traits of the mothers as much as possible. The back crossing to the father is to keep more of his traits. While it is harder to pick with the male, im hoping i have hit the nail on the head with the females. The proof will be in the progeny i guess. My aim is to do some inbreeding but only to f3 as they are only for myself. If i ever get more space i will do it properly but until then i aim to just keep enough seeds viable to do it later.

The strains i chose to cross are about as stable (for hybrids) as i'll get as all of them have been stabilized by Mr Nice and Dj short. Im not expecting much if any unstable progeny at this stage and hopefully no bottlenecks occur in the future!

I wish you luck. Let us know, how it goes.

Genetic bottleneck is generally just a reduction in genetic variability. Landraces are genepools without bottlenecks. When creating a variety, you want to limit the variability a lot. Outbreeders harbor a lot of deleterious recessive genes, therefore inbreeding is tricky. While stabilizing, the bad genes get stabilized too. There are thousands of them, you cannot avoid all.

So, if you choose, at any point two plants to base your genepool on, except when you create a f1 hybrid of far removed varieties - that should be okay, you have a bottleneck. I do not really know, how severe inbreeding depression is with cannabis and what would be a reasonable amount of parent plants. I even asked a person working with legal hemp varieties - this factor should be about the same, but he did not know.
If you just go to f2 - f3, choose a nice male and female, keep the clones and produce their seeds periodically, or produce a lot of seeds and save them, that is allright.

I have a better knowledge about general breeding than about cannabis specific one. This technique makes sense, because of the different limitations, but it irks me. What you have is an unstable IBL. If you look at the seedstock from distance, in context, it cannot be continued without reduction in quality, it is not particularly stable. I cannot preciselly put my finger on what really bothers me about working always with unstable varieties no older than ten generations, it just goes against some aquired intuition. I will need help to somehow change how I understand the whole process. While I know, that stability is not always important, if the phenos are all good, I still seem to work on the assumption that breeding is all about creating stability and predictability from variable landrace seedstocks and other sources of unpredictability.

Also, do you feel confident about the male selection process in backcrosses? Any special tricks, or just the usual?

I hope you do not take this in any negative sense. I think your plan is great, no hating.

No offence taken at all dude, it takes a bit to offend me lol.
I'll definitely keep you posted on how it all goes, got some of the F1's sprouting as we speak!!

sweeeet.
remember, pop a lot of them and grow the winners only
gl man