Understand Strains -

Is there a way to cut through all the advertising and seed marketing
to understand, as simply and concisely as possible,
the make up, or the ancestry, of available strains?

If I read that 'Basil's Budbastic#6' is
'Ocean Grown Kush x Northern Lights#9 x Blue Widow/Fruity Critical Cheese Dog'
Is there a way to actually understand what the fuck it all means???

Certain words are repeated so much that I assume they are labels, of some kind.
CHEESE
CRITICAL
DOG (or DAWG)
KUSH
OC (or OCEAN GROWN)

What I don't know is what, if anything, these labels imply...?

I once read someone say that they 'disliked everything about CHEESE'.
WHAT IS THERE TO LIKE or DISLIKE???

IF YOU WON 10 FREE SEEDS WITH A NAME THAT INCLUDED THE WORD 'CHEESE'
WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT FROM THE PARTICULAR STRAIN???

For all aspiring comedians:
Cheese is a well known dairy product and food, as well as a Cannabis label.
This leads to opportunities to post juvenile and unoriginal comments.
The hilarity could know no end (or, for that matter, beginning).
Try to resist the urge to demonstrate a lack of maturity,
a lack of originality or an excess of imbecility.
DON'T EMBARRASS YOURSELVES TRYING TO BE FUNNY.
OK?

I think its OG not OC

If it said Cheese I would expect some variation of the strain Cheese (which came from the UK as some sort of skunk clone only I BELIEVE).

I guess I don't really understand the question? It's pretty easy to google strain info no? We ALL know the Chemdawg (dog, dawg) bagseed story.

What's to like or dislike about a strain? UMMMMMM taste, smell, high, growth pattern, bag appeal etc etc etc.

check out this site north.. just type on what ever strain you're looking at, and it pretty much breaks it all the way down to parents and all.. best site i've found for genetics..

http://en.seedfinder.eu/

Brek! we gotta get that session going, Im knee deep in books and garden right now but your more than welcome to swing by if you want lolol!

Thecouchlock said:

Brek! we gotta get that session going, Im knee deep in books and garden right now but your more than welcome to swing by if you want lolol!

Click to expand...

HA!!! I know! I'd love to but I'm in the same boat. I had the last week off work. Tomorrow I have a meeting with the boss I'm not ready for at ALL. Plus garden. Let's link up this week for sure though.

Lineage is awesome. Genetics are very interesting. The science of Dank. Take this plant with these properties and breed it with a plant of more desirable traits and create a strain good for a person with certain ailments. I love it. Do your research and lurk around. There are plenty of ways, sites that will inform you of lineage.

leafly might also be able to help you find the right direction.

brek said:

If it said Cheese I would expect some variation of the strain Cheese (which came from the UK as some sort of skunk clone only I BELIEVE).

I guess I don't really understand the question? It's pretty easy to google strain info no? We ALL know the Chemdawg (dog, dawg) bagseed story.

What's to like or dislike about a strain? UMMMMMM taste, smell, high, growth pattern, bag appeal etc etc etc.

Click to expand...

I mean some kind of table or chart
like the periodic table of elements
where strains would be placed according to observable and quantifiable data.

At the moment there could be two strains that are called
DEAD BUTTERPIG and
BEAUTIFUL MOONLIGHT #9.
The names indicate no similarities or relation to each other
but, with genetic data documentation and cataloguing,
the two strains could be placed next to each other in the table of strains
because they are virtually the same.

ALSO
Maybe we have the
SENSI SEEDS EARLY DURBAN and
THE DUTCH PASSION EARLY DURBAN.
Due to the marketing and labelling, most growers believe the two are virtually identical
so they buy the cheapest.
By placing them in the genetic table of strains
maybe we could see that they are massively different to each other.

I'd just like a strain cataloguing system that was a universal standard
and would allow growers, at a glance, to observe where a particular strain was placed.

I used to study the evolution of languages
Nearly every language, from India to Ireland, has a common ancestor.
This split into Germanic, Latinate, Slavonic language groups
and each group further split into individual languages.
For example -
English came from Germanic group which came from Indo-European half
(as opposed to the Indo-Iranian half) of the Proto-Indo-European parent language).

Now INDICA/SATIVA would be the parents
The original manmade strains (Superskunk, Northern Lights) would be the groups
and the more evolved and complex recent hybrids would be akin to individual languages.

I KNOW WHAT I MEAN BUT I AM HAVING DIFFICULTY ARTICULATING MY EXACT MEANING.

check out the link i put up n.o.e. i find the site fascinating tbh..

they not only break down genetics all the way back as far as they can pretty much to the land race, or original genetics as they can, they also have a chart that puts all related strains together, which i never knew existed till a few months ago.
anyhoos, it's about the best site imo as far as what i think you're looking for..

Drksdfmn138 said:

Lineage is awesome. Genetics are very interesting. The science of Dank. Take this plant with these properties and breed it with a plant of more desirable traits and create a strain good for a person with certain ailments. I love it. Do your research and lurk around. There are plenty of ways, sites that will inform you of lineage.

Click to expand...

I am just starting to try and find a suitable place to begin the study of breeding and lineage.
I am also attempting to educate myself about making concentrates.
Both these subjects seem to have very steep learning curves at the beginning.

NorthofEngland said:

I mean some kind of table or chart
like the periodic table of elements
where strains would be placed according to observable and quantifiable data.

At the moment there could be two strains that are called
DEAD BUTTERPIG and
BEAUTIFUL MOONLIGHT #9.
The names indicate no similarities or relation to each other
but, with genetic data documentation and cataloguing,
the two strains could be placed next to each other in the table of strains
because they are virtually the same.

ALSO
Maybe we have the
SENSI SEEDS EARLY DURBAN and
THE DUTCH PASSION EARLY DURBAN.
Due to the marketing and labelling, most growers believe the two are virtually identical
so they buy the cheapest.
By placing them in the genetic table of strains
maybe we could see that they are massively different to each other.

I'd just like a strain cataloguing system that was a universal standard
and would allow growers, at a glance, to observe where a particular strain was placed.

I used to study the evolution of languages
Nearly every language, from India to Ireland, has a common ancestor.
This split into Germanic, Latinate, Slavonic language groups
and each group further split into individual languages.
For example -
English came from Germanic group which came from Indo-European half
(as opposed to the Indo-Iranian half) of the Proto-Indo-European parent language).

Now INDICA/SATIVA would be the parents
The original manmade strains (Superskunk, Northern Lights) would be the groups
and the more evolved and complex recent hybrids would be akin to individual languages.

I KNOW WHAT I MEAN BUT I AM HAVING DIFFICULTY ARTICULATING MY EXACT MEANING.

Click to expand...

OK, I get more what you are saying here. But the problem with this is finding breeders that are HONEST about their genetics. Which is a HUGE part of the confusion IMO.

OH and pass some of that Dead Butterpig this way.

racerboy71 said:

check out the link i put up n.o.e. i find the site fascinating tbh..

they not only break down genetics all the way back as far as they can pretty much to the land race, or original genetics as they can, they also have a chart that puts all related strains together, which i never knew existed till a few months ago.
anyhoos, it's about the best site imo as far as what i think you're looking for..

Click to expand...

Yeah.
It looks like it may be about the most useful site I've seen.
Cheers racerboy

brek said:

OH and pass some of that Dead Butterpig this way.

Click to expand...

NorthofEngland said:

Yeah.
It looks like it may be about the most useful site I've seen.
Cheers racerboy

Click to expand...

no problem, i found the site a few years ago when i was looking for some back ground on genetics and have been telling anyone interested in it since..

the problem is, like brek already stated, is that some genetics are simply unknown, but i found seedfinder to do a pretty decent job of trying to find the real back ground on things.. take og kush for example.. no one really knows the true story, but they go ahead and give like 4 or 5 different takes on it, pretty much leaving it up to the reader to decide for themselves..

i just like how they go all the way back as far as they can with all strains, plus they have a pretty large data base imo, with lots of newer strains, and not just limited to the old standards like northern lights and white widow..

That's very smart about the periodic table idea and in my opinion is where we are headed in the future once it becomes legal everywhere and science gets more involved. I believe it's all going to be done by terpenes. It's already started but in the infancy stages.

I can see what you're going for here, but i think it would turn out being an inefficient expenditure of time to organize such a chart. You would be contending with variance at every level when you consider that a single genome can have multiple phenotypes, that not every strain is properly 'stabilized,' and that it has been historically very difficult to keep track of breeding given the worldwide legal quandry of the past 80 years. It would seem like you'd end up with a chart that would have too many variables itself: yield, aroma, vigor, resistance, taste, appearance, size, shape, effect/cannabinoid profile.

Pretty soon you'd find that if you really care about a hardy big yielder that smells of citrus, that 75 strains would satisfy your wants. I'm really just going off of how other fruiting plants are organized vis-a-vis their characteristics: tomatoes are all S. Lycopersicum but the variance within that species is huge. the only way people know they want to grow a cherokee purple is because that 'strain' has been stabilized and people have recorded the predictable characteristics, the plant's 'preferences' etc. Or they go out on a lark and plant some seeds and give it a whirl. ethnobotany seems to be what you're most interested in, but for its pragmatic application--knowing where a species comes from can help you understand what it has evolved to prefer, but breeding is the act of guiding that evolution, so even if you had a stable chart of the 'dominant families' or 'groups,' the fact that breeding would continue would make that chart never complete, and thus a potentially endless task of infinitely decreasing value.
just my two cents,
be easy,

also, not trying to rain on the parade, i love data, and its organizaton and do believe that the idea behind this is valuable. its realization is what would seem most daunting to me, and, as has been pointed out, we'll be working with some shady information derived from shady 'breeders.' i think racerboy's link is probably the closest kind of thing we'll be able to hope for until society catches up to appreciating this plant and forking some funding over to erect the kind of ethno-historical study of cannabis that your chart would require.

NOE, I don't think you have seen all what seedfinder has to offer. Did you see the tool that say's "map this shit"? I think it is what you are looking for, they places it in a web/solar system type graph, pretty sweet. great find RB I have used it myself quite a bit.

All you can do is learn and use common sense. The basics are this: P1s (parents 1st generation) should be stable.P1s are landraces and hybrids that have been worked on for generations. If youre breeding mutts you get mutts. If you breed Pure breeds you get pure breed offspring and the variation will be reduced. There is still a lot of variations among pure breed lines but what they were bred for is usually constant. For instance, they could all have different shapes or flowering times but produce blueberry flavors or a specific trait that they were bred for. That's genetic diversity in the plants and is essential for their evolution/survival but with every introduction of new genes comes more variation for better or for worse. Without it strains become subsceptable to disease and other problems because the genepool becomes more bottlenecked. Its evolution that can happen very quickly. Over generations with selective breeding plants will become more stable and acclimated to their environment and therefore may not be suitable in a different environment or sudden environmental change.
F1s are when 2 different P1s come together. These are going to give uniform results and combine the attributes together. If the results are not than most likely your P1s are not truebreeding and that's really the only way to test them so it is a lot of work to choose a male or to continue working with a single line. It's so much easier to hit a clone with some pollen randomly vs. growing females and males labeling them keeping them growing them out and discarding crosses and plants that don't work out and starting from scratch. That's why the seed industry is the way it is. Also, F1s are said to have hybrid vigor and are more resilient because of the larger genepool.
F2s are the second generation and from there the possibilties are practically endless. Recessive traits and codominate traits start surfacing and this is where selection is most important. If you don't have a goal in mind you can't acheive anything and your just mindlessly chucking pollen for no reason. Within a few generations you will have an IBL which you could make new crosses with or refine.
If you just want something stable and close to description to grow nugs, F1s is your best bet.If you want a specific experience or are looking for a specific trait get IBLs or landraces. If you want to see a wider range of phenotypes and want to find something unique go with f2s, but the best way to get a lot of f2s is making them yourself with P1s or F1s. Keep in mind what the breeder does and why you should fork out 100s of bucks for their seed. Most don't even test their seeds before slapping a name and description down. Clone only strains are usually unknown genetics which are hybrids and you have to take their word for it that it the real deal. Growers feedback and personal experience is the best way to figure out what to expect not retailer, breeder or genetics or hype.