What am I really doing with these two females?

Ive been researching the use of collodial silver. At the moment I have Acapulco Gold and Holy Grail mothers. Of course Ill be taking cuts from them before putting them to flower but Im going to use collodial silver on one for sure the first time.

For example (no debate or speculation) I spray the Acapulco, flower, collect pollen and use it on the Holy Grail. There obviously is no male present in this so, what is it I am doing? Ive read different things on breeding but not a drfinitive answer on a situation like this.

How effective would this method cross the two, if at all?

fatalphenom said:

what is it I am doing?

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Creating feminized seeds. Not really breeding imo. Creating seeds is a part of breeding, and when creating fem seeds you basically create it based on what's already bred.

You collect pollen from the Acapulco after you change the sex of the flowers on a branch or entire plant to male. Since there are no y chromosomes involved (xx = female xy = male ) the offspring will also have only x (and all be female apart from some flukes of nature).

The cross is still a cross though. Some offspring will look like mom, some like the other mom, but half should be actually a mix.

Aright, good deal. I had read about the feminized seed part, and you did answer a little more about the traits. But I would appreciate any elaboration on that portion.

A small list of ?'s & points I'd like to see covered:

-Have you, or anyone else crossed using this method?
-How were the results considering genetic traits of the mothers?
-What 'could' I expect if I pollinate the 'new' seed with pollen of the seed-producing mother?

Definitely looks like this project could be an ongoing one! lmao

I know several people who've made femmed crosses. It works just fine. I'm waiting for balls on a plant being sprayed with silver to make S1s from my Blue Dream.
The results are just like female x male crosses except there's no males and selecting good females is WAY easier than selecting good males. Some plants resemeble one parent or the other and most are a mix of the two.
You would be backcrossing and you should get more plants that look like the original mother.

Thanks the replies guys! This sounds like a great experiment for me. I'm looking for that Holy Gold! lmfao

fatalphenom said:

A small list of ?'s & points I'd like to see covered:

-Have you, or anyone else crossed using this method?
-How were the results considering genetic traits of the mothers?
-What 'could' I expect if I pollinate the 'new' seed with pollen of the seed-producing mother?

Click to expand...

I'm working on my first attempt, so not speaking from experience yet, but to answer the three questions based on what I read:

- Yeah, we're definitely not pioneers.
- Supposedly 50% will be cross, 25% will be like mom, 25% will be like other mom. That's genotypes only and excluding possible different phenotypes.
- A MrEDuck said, that would be a back cross. With my limited understanding so far I plan to cross A with B (sativa x indica), and then cross two of their kids. And then hunt for phenos. Might change my mind in a week, but so far that seems to be the way to go (cross two different strains (outbreeding) into an F1, hope for hybrid vigor, cross two of those into an F2, and start hunting phenos). Backcrossing seems to apply more when you inbred too long and want to reinforce a trait from a grandparent.


I heard a lot of "you can't breed with feminized seeds etc" but I don't know enough about it yet to determine how much value I as a starting home-breeder / pollen-chucker should attach to that statement.

Have fun!

I've been writing out which cuts to cross and different things. I need to flower the Holy Grail mom soon, suckers been vegging since April, and have 10 cuts rooted and ready to chose a replacement. When I flower the HG-mom, I'm going to spray a couple lower branches with CS. I would rather have the pollen from the Acapulco Gold, but due to time and plant size the HG-mom is first. So as of right now I'm looking at doing this:

Acapulco Gold pollinated by Holy Grail:

- seed, germ, veg, clone, flower clones, refer back to clone-donors and keep the strongest (I'll refer to it as Gen-2 for example) as mother
-Gen-2 mother, re-clone and...this is where my hang-up is. Pollinate with Acapulo, or with Holy Grail pollen?

Any one care to state their opinion on this?

Edit: I re-read youre sentence about two diff strains into F1, then two-F1 seeds into F2. I think that answered my last question lol.

Sativied said:

I'm working on my first attempt, so not speaking from experience yet, but to answer the three questions based on what I read:

- Yeah, we're definitely not pioneers.
- Supposedly 50% will be cross, 25% will be like mom, 25% will be like other mom. That's genotypes only and excluding possible different phenotypes.
- A MrEDuck said, that would be a back cross. With my limited understanding so far I plan to cross A with B (sativa x indica), and then cross two of their kids. And then hunt for phenos. Might change my mind in a week, but so far that seems to be the way to go (cross two different strains (outbreeding) into an F1, hope for hybrid vigor, cross two of those into an F2, and start hunting phenos). Backcrossing seems to apply more when you inbred too long and want to reinforce a trait from a grandparent.


I heard a lot of "you can't breed with feminized seeds etc" but I don't know enough about it yet to determine how much value I as a starting home-breeder / pollen-chucker should attach to that statement.

Have fun!

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To get a true F1 at least one of the paretns needs to be an IBL. I prefer to think of it as not being hybrid vigor but a lack of inbreeding depression of vigor.
Backcrossing is a way of inbreeding to get traits from a particular plant. Done three times you get a reasonable representation of the original parent in seed form. Read up on the Brothers Grimm work with Princess to make C99. So much good info in the stuff they posted.
Making an F1 cross then making F2s by crossing two F1s is a great way to see a ton of phenotypical variety and then inbreeding can be used to stabilize the winner phenos.
As far as breeding with femmed seeds I've seen tons of impressive grows of gear from Female Seeds and Dinafem and they're only using females.

Anyone who tells you that you can not breed with fems has not done it.

Here are two plants, both crosses. (pollen chucking)




On the left is a friend's cross, Superpower x an Indica mutt (probably Ingrid dominant)
On the right is one of my crosses Banana Kush x Blue Dream.


my next seed crop will be Blueberry x Blueberry and one other TBD plant.

MrEDuck said:

To get a true F1 at least one of the parents needs to be an IBL.

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I can see why one would want to inbreed first before outbreeding if one were to bring seeds from Mexico, Jamaica, India etc., but for a home-breeder like me (just creating some crossed fem seeds not really breeding), building on commercial stable strains from pro-breeders, is that still relevant? Since it requires an extra cycle to IBL first, how important is it to satisfy the "true" part?

MrEDuck said:

I prefer to think of it as not being hybrid vigor but a lack of inbreeding depression of vigor.

Click to expand...

Interesting perspective, I read that hybrid vigor is specifically about getting more than the average of the two rather than preventing a decrease.

fatalphenom said:

-Gen-2 mother, re-clone and...this is where my hang-up is. Pollinate with Acapulo, or with Holy Grail pollen?

Any one care to state their opinion on this?

Edit: I re-read your sentence about two diff strains into F1, then two-F1 seeds into F2. I think that answered my last question lol.

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You'd get new pollen from the F1, and chuck that on another F1, to get the F2. From those F2 plants (which should show more pheno variety) you can pick the best, keep as mother, and grow clones from it or continue to inbred (stabilize) or outbred (add traits from other strains) with it.

I'm running ahead of myself here. I picked up bits and pieces but haven't really taken the time to read something entirely yet. Someday I'll look back at this post and laugh a bit at myself. Starting to getting a little bit more clear, but clearly still got a lot to learn. Not like there's a ton of activity in this Breeders Paradise forum so I'll continue to share my fem-seed-making-journey.


Would be great to see a bunch of mini-journal-like threads of people actually crossing with similar feminizing methods (showing both parents and offspring etc).

I definitely plan on undertaking this project. I'd like to start right away, but I'm receiving an LED that I'm going to do a veg-bloom. Since I want accurate notes to compare my previous grows, I'm not quite ready to run this project parallel. As it is now I have an 8' room for bloom, the smallest tent from VirtualSun for clone/ veg 1-4 (with LST of course). I plan on cutting the 8' room into two-3.5' or 4' rooms; I can do a cycle under the LED and still produce sensi, and flower in the other half with the plants I'll be crossing...so long as the tiniest bit of pollen doesnt creep into the sensi room! Which may be difficult in my situation. Yet the sooner I start, the sooner I can refine my own creation...THEN get back to sensi production. But the cool thing with the idea of using colloidal silver is that as long as I control what is sprayed and collect pollen balls before they break, I just might be able to avoid seeding both mothers in the same room.

Trousers said:

Anyone who tells you that you can not breed with fems has not done it.

Here are two plants, both crosses. (pollen chucking)

On the left is a friend's cross, Superpower x an Indica mutt (probably Ingrid dominant)
On the right is one of my crosses Banana Kush x Blue Dream.


my next seed crop will be Blueberry x Blueberry and one other TBD plant.

Click to expand...

I like that Indica dominant there on the left....looks like its hardy and highly resilient. You guys grow them to bloom or is that a fresh pic?

That is a couple days ago.

With crosses you really do not know what you are going to get.
I don't really care and kinda like the risk. (I haven't had a bad cross yet)

I grow for myself and even if I have an off harvest I still have more than I need.

Trousers said:

I don't really care and kinda like the risk.

I grow for myself and even if I have an off harvest I still have more than I need.

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+2

The reason I do not grow clones is because I like the variation in seeds. Adding more variation by crossing, and thereby to my stash, is an upside. Besides that, many of the commercial strains aren't particularly stable either and more than often result in runts or bad phenos.

Sativied said:

MrEDuck said:

To get a true F1 at least one of the parents needs to be an IBL. I prefer to think of it as not being hybrid vigor but a lack of inbreeding depression of vigor.

Click to expand...

Interesting perspective, I read that hybrid vigor is specifically about getting more than the average of the two rather than preventing a decrease.

Click to expand...

All makes sense after some more reading. IBL a stable strain, do the same for another IBL, then cross those into an F1 to restore the vigor that was lost during the inbreeding. Thanks again.

Seems that crossing two (stable-ish) different strains using TM/CS/STS can still be a good start to create some more variety from which to choose the base breeding stock as a home breeder.