Welcome to Breeder's Syndicate 2.0, where we explore the history of a clandestine scene. Researching everything from cannabis strain history, old smuggling tales from the first person perspective, to breeding science and news on current subculture. I'm your host Matthew, and I'll occasionally be joined by my homey Nazi dog, Breeder and Grower from Mendicino, to speak on these subjects and sometimes interview other participants. Our goal is to document this history before it's written by corporations and others who just weren't there. Let's start writing some wrongs. Welcome to the Underground. Welcome to Breeder's Syndicate! I'm Matthew, and I'm here with my host, Thousandfold, and today we're going to be talking about making seeds in small spaces and home environments. Yeah, so in the past, Matt, you and I, so I think I tended to focus on commercial breeding and the conditions of the breeding industry. And while certainly tips and techniques have been shared, you guys have peppered them amongst your anecdotes and responses. I think it's definitely a good time to have an episode dedicated to practicalities of seed making and breeding a little bit, especially for the people at home or in smaller spaces. Yeah, a lot of what we've done is more specific to people that have already maybe memorized marijuana botany. You know, like it's already more advanced what we talk about and the techniques and specifics. So a lot of people have talked about like they would like something more basic, just a quick intro on just seed making in general. A lot of the basics have been totally skipped over, left out, and there's not really anyone covering them in one spot. So yeah. Yeah, this will be fun. Without further ado, I think we can start making seeds with regular plants. And I think the first distinction I wanted to make was, you know, obviously before you get into something like this, there's a little bit of planning involved because there are timing constraints. Absolutely. So for some people, it's about lining up their males and females so that they're both ready at the right time, like that the pollen donors are ready and that the females are ready to receive at the right time. And then there's another group of people who are interested in collecting pollen, storing it, you know, what it takes to store and, you know, retain viability on pollen. So maybe the first question is, how do you stagger males and females if you're trying to line them up? So one of the questions we have is actually from Lili from our Discord. Okay. And Lili is trying, wanting to do an open pollination on some of those AK packs. Yeah, yeah. They do not want to collect pollen. They do not want to dust. They just want to like rip. So yeah, how would they stagger males and females? So the best way to stagger males and females, the only time that really needs to be done or considered is if you're crossing like a short flowering female to a long flowering male, say, or vice versa. Like that, most of the time males will flower and there's not really any staggering needed if it's the same exact strain and they're all flowering at about the same exact time. The only time it really needs to happen is when you've got an Afghani, Afghani type, let's say female and like a haze male, you know, or vice versa. Let's say a haze female and an Afghani male. The Afghani male will be done flowering, you know, eight to nine weeks, whereas that haze male or the haze female might not even start flowering until like week seven to where there's any kind of stigmatic production. So that's the only time it really needs to be taken into account. Staggering is usually a feminized breeding technique that comes into play. Okay, well, that's cool because you answered a second question, which was from Little Cabin in the Hood, who is talking about how do you deal with long-firing plants? Is the approach to staggering still the same? Yeah, I guess you sort of answered that.  How to stagger because you don't know exactly at what point the female or male, whatever, whatever case it may be, you don't know when it's going to start flowering and when it's going to end flowering and producing whatever you need it to. So it does help to have some kind of knowledge.  So if you're trying to cross two totally different types and don't really know, I do recommend a run without doing it just to see how long they flower, so that you're not wasting and blowing a whole run on all you can't use or, you know, just a whole mist that you have to wait till next round to call on me to female. No, great advice. Okay, so now in terms of the people who are interested in perhaps collecting and then storing pollen, I guess the first question is, you know, when do you collect? How do you collect to begin with? So what I like to do is use what people call trim bins. They used to be called pollen collectors, I think back in the day, but essentially it's what people have or it's a bin and then on the bottom. And then there's another bin that sits inside it but they screen on the bottom. And essentially people will trim over it and the trichomes fall and you scrape with the hash in the bottom. But with males, what we like to do is let them hang over the edge, kind of roll, gently roll them over the screen. And the reason I like using this method is because the petals of the male don't fall through to the pollen below, the actual powder, the actual pollen. And when you collect it, you're not having to scrape out a whole lot of male parts.  So that's the best method I found for collecting pollen and screening it all in one. Like in one fell swoop otherwise, you know, you can collect it and then you've got to sift out the male parts slowly. And there's all sorts of ways people have done it.  There's all sorts of different ways people have done it, but the best method for me is that method. And we'll actually come back to some of those questions about like, yeah, bagging branches and stuff. And we're back, you know, isolating the whole plant. In terms of timing, when do you collect the pollen? It's just when the sacs are open. Yeah, you want to have... So when you flower a male, you'll notice that certain sacs will open early. Now there is like breeding theory on... And I think some of it is just like based on experience as opposed to scientific theory in cannabis on, you know, the pollen that opens the earliest different color than the pollen that opens later. You know, there's theories that the more mature pollen is so much better to use than the earlier flowering, less mature pollen. I've never noticed a major difference in all of that. Usually any pollen that starts dropping, I collect into the trim bin and slowly collect it over time and then sift it all together. That's usually how I do it. But some people are very fastidious and say like, I don't collect it after a certain point. The other stuff I just let drop, you know, don't collect it all. But I've never had really any issues with that or seen any notable difference. Yeah. Okay. So earlier, I think you... You mentioned that moisture obviously is one of the key things you're trying to avoid. And so in terms of storing pollen for it to remain viable for as long as possible, what are your suggestions? Maras was asking, yeah, how do you store it? How long can pollen remain viable for? Should I cut with cornflour like some people recommend? So I don't like cutting with anything. Like, I don't see a reason to do that. Some people think that it like weighs down the pollen, makes it fall better or, you know, there's all sorts of different reasons people cut pollen that I've heard over the years, but I've never found a good reason for it. With pollen storage, I also don't have a super good answer on how long it stays viable, because I've seen it stay viable a year without being stored and just living in, you know, like air vents in a house. But I've also seen people intentionally store it really well in a freezer and a month later instead. And that's without any kind of visual contamination. So it's really hard to say, there's no guarantees when it comes to pollen, one on how long it'll stay viable. There's just no guarantees on that. Me and a few other breeders in our group don't like to store pollen in the first place, because when we go to use it, we've had so many bad experiences over the years with like just it not taking or not being as consistent, you know, after it sits for a month, that it's not really worth storing over time. So I don't have really great recommendations other than to say the way that we've tried it. And that, you know, making sure all of the petals, like whether people realize it or not, there are petals on the male flower. If you look at it real close, it's a male flower, you know, that hangs down, the petals are opened up, and that's what the stuff falls out of. Now there's little parts that open up, that's not pollen. That's a part of the petals, and we do not collect that. So that's like one of the most important things that I see most errors made are that people wet petals and they're pollen. Now when they scrape it up, and you could put it in like a black film containerster, like the old photography film canisters are perfect. Anything dark, you don't want any light getting to it, light destroys pollen and moisture destroys pollen.  You know, I've seen people sell it, and I've also heard nightmares about the customers who bought sold pollen that's been stored X amount of months, you know, and sent by a mail. If you're going to do that, just beware pollen, you know, it's very hit or miss, very hit or miss on storage. Is that a recent thing, people selling pollen, or is that, no, it's been going for a while now? It's more recent. I mean, the past maybe three or four years, I've seen it pop up and I just, as most people know, like that have been making seeds, how unviable stored pollen can be, and how unpredictable. So it wasn't really like a market, but now that more people are trying to make seeds that don't really have any knowledge about it, they're more susceptible to buying it, you know, I've seen. Right, so I think it's just like another, another kind of ploy. Yes, 100%. Okay. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I guess, well, just while we're talking about storing pollen and all that, and you kind of mentioned, obviously you've had quite a bit of experience with this, like, do you have any, do you have any funny stories about storing pollen or like pollen fails or? I've seen, I've seen, I've seen pollen cut with cornstarch and have weevils pop up in it. That was pretty gross. You know, I'd like, I just, mostly the stories are like pollen storage, it looks fine, you go to dust it, and you know, it's something you're really relying on, like a lot of times when we would store pollen, it would be feminized pollen, reverse pollen, because one, it's a pain in the ass to do, two, it's never assured that it's going to drop, no matter what spray you're using or technique you're using, it's never assured it's going to drop, three, it's never assured it's going to be viable, so when you get it, you know it's viable, a lot of times you treat that like gold and want to store it, but the problem is like, when we've gone back and used it, we have to wait, you know, four days, a week to see if it took, and usually that's during prime dusting time, and we'll get into what prime dusting time is. Yes, we will. And if that doesn't take, then you're also back a week on prime dusting time, and you have to either hope that you have other pollen somewhere, another, you know, Plan B, or your crop is now going to be a Zomea that's been dusted by unviable pollen that you probably don't want to smoke, you know, it's just one of those things, yeah. And again, some people say they smoke pollen, so there is that too. What? The thing, yeah, I heard the other day about someone saying that they got, I think it was, the Zomea guy was talking about, some guy gets the pollen and puts it in his mouth and like uses it like medicine, like choose it. I mean, I think someone was joking in the server the other day about getting, tricking people and doing lines of it. Oh, I know that. I think that was on CSI's post when I was trying to tell people they should do lines of it. That was me. That was me trying to trick people. That was you. That was me trying to trick people into doing lines of pollen, yeah. I've seen that done too. That is the most hideous, horrid, like sinus infection you can ever get is snorting pollen, I would imagine. Kids at home don't do that. Do not snort pollen. There's no drugs in it. There's no, it's just going to make you sneeze a lot and probably give you an infection. But yeah. Yeah, but the post was about, the post in reference to it was CSI asking, he's heard about people smoking their meals. What do you people think about this?  But yeah. There were people chiming in saying, yeah, I always smoke my meals. Yeah, they're heady. I get that there are resin glands on some males, not in prodigious amounts. Some have them in prodigious amounts and I tend to think those are more intersex type males and not males that you'd want to be using anyways. But the ones that have some resin, I guess maybe people can smoke those petals. They're not for any reason at all. I mean, yeah, I know we're not really going to talk so much about selections today, but it is interesting, right? The whole process is like, because it's so opaque, people have to, people come up with like all kinds of strange, like almost like divinatory. Yeah. It's what it is, it is. Trying to make these selections. Somewhere and there's no real defined way to start because you don't know what you have until you run the progeny and that's really all they're boils down to. So people have come up with all these methods they think are... Yeah, like you said, read the bones, read the stars. Yeah. Okay. Well, okay. Coming back to this process of making seeds and you already gestures towards this. When do you, when do you want to pollinate your females and how? Okay, so this is a good one to use like a rule of thumb for all females no matter when they're flowering. You want to pollinate them when their hairs are the most white, right?   That means that hair can no longer receive pollen and transport the seed into the ovule or whatever's going on. I don't know the technicality of it. I'm trying to make it seem more human but that's not really what's happening, obviously. But yes, that's technically what's going on. The hair receives the pollen, the pollen grain, pollinates the embryo right here forms in the bract and then you know. So if the hair's dead, it can't receive pollen therefore that bract cannot make seeds. So you want it to be ultimately where it has the most white hairs living without any died off. That is the perfect point for pollination at all times, no matter what. Sometimes that can be a 13 weeks flower you know, Malawi's, Haze's whatever. Sometimes it could be a 20 weeks flower on some of that stuff and sometimes it can be week 5, week 6. Sometimes it's week 4. It really just depends on the line you're running but overall the rule of thumb is the most white hair is the least amount of brown. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So in terms of the actual method of pollination, like I mentioned earlier I guess we obviously you can just have your plants in the same room, your males and females and just let them go. But I guess some of these questions are more about for lack of a better term partial or isolated pollination techniques. Sure. So Dudan has mentioned small pollen runs and applying with brushes. Maras was like, yeah, you know, pollinate, can you pollinate one branch and let the rest of the plant flower? You know, that kind of thing. Can you, a booze even was like can you brush multiple pollen sources multiple? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, what are the risks there? So, yeah, a variety of questions about brushing on and this logic of this is presupposing that you have a completely opposite and distant storage place for males. Because if you're doing isolated pollinations, you do not want any chance for any of these males to flower in the same building as your receivers. And I guess that also kind of gets down to pollen isolation. I don't know if we want to talk about that first maybe before we discuss that. Well, I thought maybe we would have a whole section on the different isolation techniques. And so maybe here you're just going to broad stroke, but I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, pollen isolation methods, there is no good pollen isolation method in my opinion. So that's a broad stroke of it. If you're going to try to do isolated pollinations in a small plant, I wouldn't. If all you have is, if all you have is like a tent or maybe even two tents in the same house even if they're across the room it would be very hard to pull off a plant flowering. And I'm thinking about like a house with central air maybe pull off a plant flowering and a male flowering because pollen is so fine and so light and almost so microscopically that it is very, very hard. And I always go back to this case in point. I did my blue bonnet pollinations at a big at like a 5,000 square foot house, okay. And in the back is where I did the pollination of the furthest back room you can possibly do.  And I was like, okay, so I did the pollination I did the blue bonnet pollination a year prior a year, a whole frickin year prior. And I did it open in that back bedroom. So this next one I was going to do in a tent and I wasn't doing a pollination. I was going to do a cinca miller room. And that run inside of a tent with a carbon scrubber on the outside still got blue bonnet pollen from a year prior from the air vents inducting the only place I didn't clean was my central air got pollinated it was a decent pollination of a tent separated with the carbon scrubber inside the same house in a completely separate room. So for an example, that's how easy it is. And it wasn't just kind to pollinate. It wasn't just a few seeds. It was enough to do it was enough to get a look inside stuff like 500 seeds of plant like a lot. Not a lot but I mean enough to where it wasn't just a grain here or a grain there. It was a serious contamination and it would ruin a cinca miller run completely. So when trying to do like these isolated pollen runs it is best if you have some way to store your mail at a completely different location that's the only time I would say I would attempt any kind of isolated pollen introduction. No, it's really fascinating and actually we have a bunch of different questions on like different possible ways of isolating. So maybe we actually will come back to this Eric and for now why don't we just assume we have some pollen we won't mention how but assume we have some pollen for now and given and if we skip the contamination issue if you have some pollen and you did want to say try to just do one branch or like different branches with different kinds of pollen like how well does that work in and of itself? So I mean yeah people have done it very effectively over the years as long as the the mails were kept separate and introduced you know one by one a lot of times what people will do instead of just so there's a few techniques there's the bagging technique bagging technique A which would be to have a bag and a lot of they make pollen bags specifically for this to let air breathe but not if they're they're so tight that the pollen can't escape that's supposedly the theory I haven't ever used these things but that's that's how they supposedly work and they I've seen it work and you put this over the branch that that you're wanting to pollinate so you insert the branch into this bag you tie it off and then you kind of agitate it you know you you let that sit a few days you take it off you blow down the plant with some water you know what I mean you don't want to mold the plant obviously but you want to wash it off so the pollen isn't viable in hitting other branches that's the theory of washing it off and yeah that's one method another method is to tie off all branches and then do that one branch undo it spray it off with water and then undo all the other branches but that obviously opens you up to more molding if you're doing every single branch even though that there's air exchange in these bags there's still a chance to bring in mold you know that's another method and it's it's doable you know some people like to introduce pollen pollen via brushes but brush I mean you've got to remember pollen's tiny when you're using these brushes brushes even if you don't see it some of these bristles will flick and it'll flick the pollen and if things aren't tied off everywhere like using those bags or other kind of bags it's going to flick onto other branches this is light stuff so it's just a really it's just like anything the more care you take the more time you take the more accurate you can be when it comes to stuff like that as long as your mail is somewhere else if your mail is in the same room again or in the same house it's very hard to contain and but I mean there's ways to do everything you know it just there's time patience money you know they make pollen chambers of money you know if you have the money for a real true isolation chamber that would be great but I don't know anybody who has those so so coming back to booze question on like which seems now to me given what you said like quite ambitious which is like you dust different branches with different pollen which you can do it by imagine again there's like a decent risk that your branches are cross yes cross pollinated right yeah I mean there's a good chance that there will be some cross contamination like oh yeah pretty high but if you're doing that you're only getting a small amount of seeds anyways if you're doing branch branch style pollinations and it's just for you most likely just for you or your friends to look at so yeah cross contamination thing probably there isn't as important because it's mostly just for people to get a look at their stuff if you're doing if you're like selling branch made seeds then you should probably start like having a serious talk with yourself about like is this really what I think it is you know do some you know personal bias confrontation is this really isolated as much as I think it is and should I sell this is it a decent representation of what I want to sell yeah this is where your personal ethics and morals come into play I guess absolutely yeah yeah okay alright so um was anything else you wanted to say on the actual act of pollinating um um because we kind of like yeah yeah roughly how yeah so usually it takes anywhere from three days to a week to watch the pollen take to watch to know that the pollen has taken and usually the way we know that is that the hair dies off yeah usually and if it's not just one or two it's several where you pollinated then you know it's taking the pollen viable but usually that three days to a week is like breath holding time it's the work especially if you're doing reversals you are like on pins and needles holding your breath every time me and me and inspect us yes I was like it worked you know like every time you know oh my god it worked you know we're both holding our breath for each other's reversals because some people this is hard and it's very expensive to fail and it's very very expensive and very demoralizing to fail you know like to have something look really good form balls you know like do all that get to the process and just and drop pollen and then it's not viable that's brutal yeah because I guess it's like quite a long gamble right you you obviously you have to grow the plants and like get the pollen do all the stuff and it doesn't work and it's and in our cases it's not just one plant that we're reversing we're reversing many to try to beat the odds of you know sterile pollen or pollen or balls not forming you know what I mean because that can happen too even if it's the same clone of the same thing in the same tray in a microclimate we have three not flip or you know three totally flip not drop pollen and seven totally flip and drop pollen or vice any of those numbers could switch around so it's like we're not even doing just one we're doing several you know it is a big undertaking in a big gamble for sure yeah and we're going to come back to reversal specifically after this okay okay so if you're happy we can move on to you know when will seeds be ready and how do you collect seeds and how do you store seeds you know for long term viability so for a long time viability and storage of seeds there is a small process it's not as simple as make the seeds pluck them out and sell them right away or maybe Matt before you get into that like when when do you even like okay when our seeds ready so if I'm like explaining this to someone who has never harvested seeds before how do they know when their seeds are ready without chopping their whole plant and just hoping so there's always a few methods that I use and first you want to look at the tops usually you can see in the tops where the light hits the strongest you can see if there is brown sticking out of the tops right and then you know if you're if you have some mature seeds at the top usually if you're seeing brown seeds poking out that means those seeds at the top are fully mature this is where a lot of people make the mistake of chopping their plant and just being done letting it you know dry out and then finding out that most of the seeds are immature because the seeds at the top with the most light tend to be the most mature the fastest what I like to do is go to the bottom of the plants and I'm not talking about the armpits because the armpits they're called the primordial seeds I believe they're called that form in the armpit area of the seeds or of the plants those almost always form real healthy ripe and are done fast interesting yeah but yeah but the seeds in like a bottom bud getting the least amount of light those are the ones that interest me because when those are done and if they're done in multiple locations on the bottom of the plant that's usually a good um predictor of the rest of the plant now usually I'll do like four spots on the bottom four spots on the middle four spots on the top and if all of them are coming out nice and mature then that's when I start harvest otherwise if there's any immature in there I'll give it another week I won't even look at it I'll give it a whole another week and just come back to it later but that's that's usually the best predictor go down to those bottom nugs and check those check the maturity and when I'm talking about maturity there's a few things also when it comes to seeds there's there's the seed strength if you're able to put it in your fingers and not crush it immediately with just a good amount of pressure right away that's a good sign that there is is the seed if you could drop it on a hard surface and you hear a sound like a ping a specific sound that's a good sign it means that there's weight and heft the seed there's probably an embryo and that's viable and the look of course but the look is something that a lot of people don't get like tiger stripes a lot of us use seed blowers now and that can blow that that thin layer that tiger stripe layer is a thin layer and that can be blown off just by using these blowers and initiating the seeds and knocking them against each other in the blowers the best the best predictor is usually color look the tiger stripes but not all seeds have tiger stripes either a lot of Southeast Asians are pure black a lot of Mexicans are pure black seeds sometimes some are just hard gray you know like a dark gray but the best predictor is the heft and the touch for me and and knowing that you know the rest of the seeds are mature in the plant right like that's important yeah great points okay I just want to ask like in terms of you know scanning the lower you know lower branches and nodes as well as the the high ones closer to the light there's I assume based on what you're saying that there's no risk of leaving them too long like the the ones that mature more quickly it's okay for them to be left as long as your humidity isn't too high because I have seen people leave seeds in their plants too long and have them germinate inside the plant I've seen that it looks freaky as fuck it looks like an alien plant like with a you know the tails sticking out of the buds as opposed to white hairs it looks so freaky but that's the only time that there's ever really a big risk seeds store well in cannabis a lot of times we found like if we leave seeds inside bud even if they're like in a hot garage that's been you know 114 whole summer for whatever reason staying inside that bud it protects it better than almost anything else other than fridge or freezer so that's something to keep in mind too it's a great storage technique so you're not really hurting your plant by the seeding in their longer they don't get overly mature unless unless your humidity is way too high and you just need to check the humidity of that's going on now that's a great point and yeah great great points also on all those different ways of checking for maturity so you did it you did just mentioned this but how about storage now okay so storage after you harvest your seeds one of the things that we like to do like at least in our group is to well first you want to dry them out fully for two weeks I set them out like a ramekin tray I let them dry out for two weeks full I want them to be totally dry no nothing on them and then I'll take those I'll put them in a freezer ziplock bag I keep specifying this because freezer or stronger or thicker milling mills I guess they call it for plastic thicker mills the freezer bag by ziplock or whoever long as it's a really thick protective layer on the baggie I put them in those I put them in another one just to ensure that no moisture can get in then I toss them in the fridge or freezer either one for me doesn't really matter I like fridge for for the first run and I'll throw them in the fridge for another two weeks and that simulates the process of winter like when seeds are dropped from the plant naturally and they kind of bury themselves underground they stay cold for the whole winter when it gets hot then they germinate that's the idea we want these things to germinate the first second that they are warm and in moisture and by going by pushing it through that fridge process it makes them germinate very fast after like even if it's a year after two years after it just if that process is ready for whatever reason yeah yeah again for fun storage fails any stories, anecdotes witness to anything weird oh my god so there are very few breeders I know that initially started out by buying seeds and storing them in a fridge most of us learned that the hard way and like I went through a whole summer in San Diego that was just the most brutal summer up to that point ever I remember moving there from Bakersfield and thinking why did I move here for climate when it's just as hot as Bakersfield and granted the temperature wasn't the same but because it was right on the beach downtown and all that right at the harbor downtown it was insanely hot there so hot that summer and it cooked almost my whole collection of seeds just because I didn't have a fridge to store them in fridge storage is so important like I said some people prefer freezer for long-term if I know I'm not going to be taking seeds in and out if it's something that I'm like I like to collect land races from around the world and I put those in a bag and I store those in the freezer and I don't take them in and out to look at them they're just in there you know and that's for a rainy day that's you know 10 20 years down the line when I have a big climate outdoors where I feel like they'll be able to be grown best to express the best so I can see what I have but most of the time if I'm taking something in and out fridge is good I don't like rapid drastic temperature fluctuations from you know below freezing to room temperature within and out or probably wouldn't be that good for them so I like doing fridge for in and out you know if I'm taking stuff in and out repeatedly but fridge storage is just so important if you can find any room in your guys fridge for your collections or if you can afford to run another fridge specifically for some of the bigger collections you'll be helping the future you'll be helping yourself I've watched seeds lose viability in five years without any kind of heat I've watched them stay viable for 15 plus years because of fridge you know and easy to pop so I again I can't emphasize how many of us have lost whole collections by not fridge storing it is so important yeah yeah good points and I you did mention this but I wanted to draw a bit more attention to it if you have used the freezer do you have to pay attention to if you're taking them out to actually germinate that transition in temperature I'd like to move from the freezer to the fridge for a day the fridge yeah but I you know I know people that have taken them out of the freezer to room temperature and pop them just fine it's just one of those things where I just like logically in my head it makes sense to not push that fluctuation a whole bunch well you're trying to reduce as much risk as possible yeah reduce the risk and shock to the embryos because they are small little things yeah my little living things yeah okay well in terms of the so we started the section is about regular seed making in it and I wanted to take us through a fairly linear sequence of steps which we did do so I was thinking at this point we could kind of go parallel and and and talk about reversals so I guess here you've already talked about you know when to pollinate collecting seeds all that so you don't have to go over that again maybe here we're just talking about you know applying the reversal chemicals or spray you know how how does that work maybe you could talk about the different approaches with different chemicals a bit we don't go too deep but yeah just so people have an idea maybe we start with someone who has your reversal spray how does that work one second mom decided to bug moms okay so with reversals like let's say someone went to my site purchased my spray but doesn't really know the one thing I would say is pay attention to what size you're buying because we have our medium and our large they both come in the same size bottle 16 ounces but the medium is more dilute than the large essentially to save water weight like we're only adding water to one to ship it you know to add it to the large it would have been 64 more ounces of water or whatever it is so pay attention to the ratio mixing that to water it's super important if you get the ratio wrong you can cause a reversal failure you need to have the ratios correct so pay attention to that large is 1 to 18 medium is 1 to 9 smallest 1 to 9 of the solution the stock solution is what we sell to 9 parts water or 18 parts water when they get it the idea is to you know make your spray I assume people going to put it in a 16 or 32 ounce bottle you know makes it up shake it really well my spray is a silver nitrate sodium thiosulfate base in a solution so you want to mix it really well it's already been thoroughly mixed but when you get it it's sat for a while shake it up really really well and you know on the instructions we used to say you know spray once a day to ensure a reversal because if you spray daily your plant will reverse some plants like it more only once a week some plants you only need to spray once every two weeks and they'll reverse just fine some plants need it once a day for three and a half weeks specifically and it usually at three and a half weeks like on the money you will see signs of a sex reversal some kind of sexual like usually because what people don't realize when you're doing a reversal you're not turning a female into a male you're making a female have male parts and by doing that it's going to maintain that female floral structure so the male parts won't form and hang in the armpits like they normally would on a male it's forming a long tight bud bud cluster and usually with failures what happens is clusters too tight and they can't mature they can't like stretch out get their anthers out and open up and you know fully mature so some of that is from probably spraying too much as best we can tell so in cases like those you want to turn it down to like once spraying once a week or once every two weeks with that said first reversals by this point you should know the plant irreversing you should know it real well and you should expect the first reversal to be a learning process not a one and done I'm going to bang this out who's successful because you have to learn the plant and how it's going to reverse you have to know any number of factors and like I said I always recommend doing like a tray of them because one is really hard to learn from when you can learn from 12 of the same clone these clones of the same clone interact with the spray from which angles and light sources you get a lot more data from that than you would one plant that either reverses correctly or fails so I often recommend that yeah you know like on a successful reversal the the the buds of male flowers will form they'll open up and just like a male you'll be able to slap the side of it and it will pollen will fly that's what you want in a successful reversal there's a lot of times where it'll form in that cluster and you see that they're open up and you know you'll pick one of those out of that tight little cluster and you'll put it in your hand and you'll see pollen and you know it'll flatten out and then you realize oh god I gotta grab tweezers and each one of these and drop it into the trim bin and no shit this is like I would say at least half of the reverses go this way right where it's a tedious process of taking each of these petals or each of these floral structures over the trim bin or you know you drop them all in there and slowly agitative and knock the pollen out over the screen but a lot of them are like that a lot are like that so expect to do one or the other a successful reversal where we're woohoo woohoo that's when you just kind of cap it and it and that happens but a lot of time expect to be doing the tweezer method yeah yeah so different degrees of success I guess we could say exactly exactly and there's nothing predictable no matter what like like I said we're using a silver nitrate sodium thiosulfate base whether you're using a silver nitrate cobalt green base whether you're using just what else is there silver colloidal silver whether you're using that it's all the same process on the same bud trying to trying to have the ethylene blocking action because that's what's going on that's what we're trying to achieve and produce intersex traits okay so another basic question when do you even start applying the spray okay that's a really good question because I think it's one of the most often asked and I've seen people like spray you know while the plants and veg thinking that might help the idea with spraying is you want to first you in your brain you need to make a clear division you need to make a clear division between the receivers and the donors that's super super important in your mind that has to be made because when you're doing the reversal let's say you have 60 plants you're not doing a 60 plant reversal like if some of those have to receive the plant you know as you receive the pollen so in your mind figure out what you want to be the receivers and what you want to be the donors and donors are being the plants that you will spray that's that's how we define you want to you want to mentally separate the male donors from the receivers and you want to take the male donor or the plants that will be male the donors and you want to put them in a separate lighting environment maybe even a tent or another room and you want to initiate flower whether that's putting it into 1212 for you whether that's 1113 whether that's 1014 whatever flower is to you you want to initiate flower and on that first day that you initiate flower to the plants you're spraying you want to spray on that first day and that's when you'll start counting three and a half weeks from to where you should expect to start seeing balls now that's not always a guaranteed thing either sometimes plants will show in two weeks sometimes they'll show in you know three weeks but almost always by week three and a half they're showing no matter how long they flower any of it they'll always show some sort of sexual reversal within three and a half weeks using mice spray specifically yeah yeah you want you want to keep them in a separate lighting source and you initiate flower on the day and you start spraying on the day you initiate flower for those plants and usually when you're doing reversals you want a a anywhere from one week to two and a half to three week staggering period of introducing females into the room with it so sometimes depending on when that pollen will drop so let's say after you've been spraying it for 21 days or so okay so this is three weeks in I'll start introducing some of the females in right now to start catching the pollen because at about week four or five if I'm using like an afghani type or a nine week flowering plant week four or five we want those to be catching the pollen from this plant that is just about to start kicking the pollen so it would about week three it takes about three four or five weeks depending on the plant for it to do that and we just don't know exactly where it's going to be or when it's going to fire off so we'd like to stagger some at a week some after two weeks some after two and a half weeks just to mitigate the odds everything is an odds game when it comes to reverse it's like gambling and it's yeah yeah almost it was like every stage has a different I mean it does every every stage has a different element of a gamble right yeah and that's why it used to kill me like for years when me and rascal and a few others with only Americans doing reversals and people like the first thing to say is that's a shortcut that's cheating man that's a shortcut and that's cheap and it's like do you have no clue how much of a short this is so much more labor intensive space intensive like emotional than anything like I would I would choose using a mail all day over reversing if I had my dreaders and the tools were correct like the plants are correct for what I want to achieve I would prefer to use a mail over reversals just because of how much easier it is just the emotions like to have lost and like failure sock it's brutal I've seen so many people quit so many people quit like the whole business over over reversal failures because it's just devastating financially and emotionally like it's hard for some people it really reminds me and this is kind of a bizarre like aside but I used to enjoy watching these different shows online either people who were middle detectorist or like gold hunters and you kind of see the kind of the psychological game that they have to play with themselves where they're like okay we invested all this money on this patch of grounds we've got all this equipment here God please I hope we find something it costs an X amount of money to rent this equipment the time everything if I broke down how like yes I does it and like that he still pays certain certain folks when rooms don't reverse like people are still having to be paid and whatnot like it is a huge expense each failure like it's okay when it's just me and it's piddling around in my place if I have like seven satellite locations that people need to be paid out or what have you because they live there and it's their electricity and whether the reversal works or not they still have to pay their electricity and for their time that's when it becomes a serious business because that can add up super fast yeah yeah yeah so I guess those of you who are like not doing this commercially be thankful in that sense well I mean and it goes to what's going on in the community that people are seeing with their eyeballs on this is June 28, 2023 when we're recording this but the climate you know politically as far as cannabis goes like the seed makers are dropping out real fast a lot of people are folding up shop and going into some other skill what they have because the weed ain't doing it cannabis isn't doing it, seed making isn't bringing the money you know you're going to start seeing a lot less femme seed makers in America because of how much it costs to fail and probably seeing a lot more Spanish production of femme seeds being sold by American breeders pretending they're their own essentially that's my opinion yeah hot take no it's good and actually there I don't know if we have those questions in for this episode but maybe for another episode there are there's not like breeding politics it's not something you guys have approached you guys obviously talked about breeding politics a lot but I think someone had a question that was like I don't think we're going to answer it right now but it was like okay so what's the difference between like a seed maker and a breeder and like what are these breeders doing who are like outsourcing and yeah that's a whole show in itself yeah it is okay so we've just covered reversals and I'm wondering is this a good time to kind of like gesture towards seed making with auto flowers now I know that you mentioned to me earlier before this started that like if we were going to talk breeding autos that's like a whole thing right because it's very heavily selection involved all that yeah but if we were just focusing on the seed making part of one step thing what are the differences if you were making seeds before this so the biggest thing to take into consideration with auto flowers I think a lot of people are it's appealing to people first that are new growers because of the light cycle it's one thing one variable they can take out of the equation that like to people who have been growing for a long time it seems silly to worry about the light hours because that's done by a timer you know but like that seriously that's a major consideration people take another consideration people take with auto flowers I think is that it's being sold to them that it's going to be flowering faster than other plants and that it's equally as dank to other plants so they the only trade off they think in their mind is going to be the light hours right when making seeds with auto flowers one thing you take it you have taken account you can't clone auto flowers that's the biggest downside if you find a keeper in seeds your best bet is to have already be making seeds with it because you can't clone it it's not like something you can easily re-vege because once it's flowering it's flowering and that's that so it's a major downside to auto flowers that you can't keep a clone and breed with it so a lot of times people are just flowering them out making the seeds the first gun you know you can make seeds with auto flowers without going into the breeding aspect and let's just say you want to make seeds make more seeds of auto flowers make sure you're crossing an auto flower to an auto flower do not try to cross like an auto flower line to like some photo period which only auto growers call things photo periods if you call things photo period you're calling yourself out also yeah but you don't want to use like pollen from a regular race versa a regular female being pollinated by an auto male because what you're going to get is a pretty wild distribution of of photo period and auto flowering mixed in you're not going to have a fully auto flower line so if you're going to make more seeds of an auto flower cross an auto flower to an auto flower so you don't have to worry about that I mean I remember like there's a term that people use which is semi-auto but is that like have you heard that there is some stuff like let me think of a good example old Betsy maybe where it tends to heavily pre flower meaning it's always kind of like flowering a little bit like it's always at like week two so yeah there's always some kind of stigma formation a lot of those semi-autos you can make seeds with in veg like if you have a male that you know flowers and veg because a lot of them will if they're stuck in a little solo cut like once their roots hit the side they will immediately start flowering and if you have some of these you know semi-auto flowers and veg you can technically make seeds with those in veg under 24 hours of light it's one of the damnedest things you've ever seen so some people like those because when you put those semi-autos into flower they're already like two weeks in so it's it gets like a second stacking as it were so some people like it for that reason I can't think of any other reason to use those other than trying to create a new auto flowering line through selective breeding because it already has that early trigger trait which kind of you know there there is debate on whether Ritterals is a whole nother part or section of cannabis or whether it is like an afghan that is just has this kind of mutant triggering trait as it were like it's a trait that can be bred as opposed to being a whole nother section or type of cannabis yeah yeah because I think I've seen the other way I've seen semi-autos being marketed as like fast flowering right yeah that just sounds now like very euphemistic I don't know if like they're referring to dwarfs because there used to be a thing called auto flowering dwarfs and I don't really see that term as much anymore but that was a thing where like they would supposedly they would be flowering from seed to end a flower in 60 days and that was what was promised so a lot of people fell for that real fast because from seed germination to flower in 60 days is extremely fast now it was more like 75 to 80 which was still fast considering no veg time but you know I mean is it so far that you're going to take a dive in the quality I don't know it's worth that yeah yeah I actually don't know shit about autos they're gaining popularity I think they didn't have any popularity in the US for a long time when I started fucking with them and then lately it seems like that there is a group in the US that are just like hardcore auto flowering enthusiasts which is cool like they need someone being enthused for them I guess it was big in the European home grower apartment market that's where it really booms yeah and that makes sense from that perspective okay no really interesting well I think for us we've kind of covered the like the more linear seed making set of questions how do you make seeds and like I mentioned earlier there is a whole section because people have all these different questions and ideas about isolation right and like whether you're isolating the males isolating the pollen the pollen branches and I think it would be interesting for us to go through some of these questions because you already adjusted towards the fact that you're pretty pessimistic for example about isolating your males in the same building right and whether that can work so okay let's just let's just get into it let's dive in let's dive in so okay of course the general question and this one is raised by dudeness ways to avoid pollen contamination areas with turbulent air flow but okay don't answer that one because the more specific ones are like ones from booze setting up an isolated space for males or donors you kind of did talk to this speak to this already and I assume he means in the same building yeah I assume so it's like do you do it can you do it if you want to try to do it you know what's the best you could do so I don't I wouldn't and the best you could do would be to have enough money to be able to buy the right filters you know what I mean like there's ways to do it set it up like a tissue culture lab for each one of like a mini tissue culture set up for each one of your males and have all the exhaust going way out of the house at the end point tons of filtration but I mean it's it would be serious a serious undertaking to build that stuff it'd be worth it it'd be cool to see someone do it you know for cannabis but it would be a serious undertaking but it could be done you know if you can have multiple tissue culture labs and multiple things being studied in different places in a tissue culture lab there's no reason that we couldn't pull it off with cannabis no but if you're like at home you know what are the chances that you'll have access or you know zero I don't recommend it I don't like because you people argue with me on this all day and I know it like you know some people think that HEPA filters are just good enough like tent next to tent next to the tent with scrubbers on them and in my experience like I've watched that fail epically and the pollen was in the central air ducting it wasn't even like it was on the tent it didn't matter so you're talking about even scrubbing like both the intake and like exhaust and that still is like fallible it's very fallible very fallible yeah because boo's next question is like an amplification of that which is like okay multiple males are donors keeping them because that's even worse that's even compounding it even further it's not even saying like okay now you might get pollination where you don't want it it's like you might get pollination from God knows which donor and it's going to be a who's your daddy yeah and I've you know like the one thing that I tell people to look out for when assessing freighters how many males are they using and how long did it take them to amass these males and make these lines because if they've got like a list for example 75 males and it took them two years to do it that's an issue like unless you know that they've got like this massive massive corporate production building somewhere where this is possible if you know they're making seeds in their house and then they've got 75 different males in two years you should be very concerned you should be very concerned it's not possible you know okay so if I were to like reframe this am I right in saying that if you if you want to do any kind of like seed making at all you should be prepared for like how do I phrase this well everything to get to get pollinated yes yeah and that's why I tell people to like a lot of my friends when they're just starting talking about making seeds but they want to still run since the media production or I know they're selling flour or what have you I always tell them there's going to be a point of where you're going to have to make that decision to be I'm either going to only sell seeds or I'm only going to sell flour because at some point you're going to have a whole since the media run get pollinated if you're playing with a male in the same house it's going to happen so you need to make that decision I sort of got everybody I've told this to that kind of ignored it comes back to me later and is like yep you're right I had to make that decision you know like I can't read or I can't grow since me and I had to switch to all things and it's it's scary it's a scary switch going from from maybe something more something that that has been consistently more money making for someone to support their life to jump to that to try to make a set of seeds yeah because I mean seeds are no guarantee that they're going to sell you never know you cannot predict what the market's going to buy ever so I guess if you in terms of like different degrees of mitigation I guess like if you're if you're just making seeds for yourself maybe the main thing then is just at least just having the one donor at if you were like say you're just a home grower and you're trying to make seeds for yourself just having one male so at least at least if there's contamination you know well you have a pretty good guess at where it's coming from so yeah I mean like some people would want to like break it down to oh well can I keep multiple males of one strain sure and you'll know what line it's from but let's say you know you pop a seed and you're like oh my god I want to reproduce this which male made it you don't know you can't do it you know like that's where you're stuck unless you just clone that one plant or if you didn't keep clones now you're really screwed so you take that into account as well yeah yeah and well we we had a last question on this I think it's sort of covered because the method seems irrelevant now but Skristen was saying you know doing the bag method for pollen donors I assume he means either bagging the whole plant or just bagging the um the branches it's the same right same risks it's not going to change that same risks it's always going to be the same kind of thing some people do it really well but like I said it's it's a matter of how tedious how how good you are with like understanding pollen control all that some people can pull it off real well and some people can't some people have done it for 30 years I'm just really can't and I'm one of the people who probably would never even attempt it because I know I'm a clusterfuck and I would trip or do something stupid knock a branch yeah yeah okay and I think we kind of covered the other forms of isolation um in terms of like we talked earlier about isolating the pollinated branches themselves yeah and trying to bag those so I think we don't have to go over those again um that's kind of it for this like isolation and contamination prevention section and at least in terms of questions okay was with any other points you wanted to make about isolation contamination I just want to drive home the point that you know like it a lot of people have this idea in their head that you always need to have multiple males from the same line to preserve diversity and and granted I don't want to go too deep into breeding theory on this but they have this idea that they need to use multiple males to preserve diversity cannabis is already a very diverse plant if you're doing it with a line that's a polyhybrid it's going to be diverse whether you use multiple males or not so just I would I would always recommend going with one male trying it if it doesn't work out if he doesn't make what you like select another male do it again it none of this is easy there's no shortcut there's luck luck comes into play a lot and luck can be a great helper but there's no quick way to rush through this intentionally and and and intentionally make lines and and learn if you're rushing so that's that's the only thing I drive home be tedious about pollen control um learn about pollen and and how easy it it transports and I think it'll make a lot of sense and people like you're the hepa theory filter because there are a lot of people with tense that that make seeds that swear up and down they can have said reversals in their house right next to each other because they have hepa filters like it blows my mind and people just kind of believe it so hopefully this will help some of those people understand really what's going on there and how small pollen truly is um as a prompt I was curious like what if you had you know yeah one pack of regular seeds and you're just like I'm just gonna let I'm just gonna let them rip um I know this is now we're kind of edging towards like more breeding because when you think about open pollination obviously that implies they're gonna be further stages that will take advantage of that in some way but you just said you recommend just using one mail what about someone who's just like nah I just want to let the whole pack rip and do whatever they want what are the trade-offs the only time I would let all mails in a room is if it's a line that needs preserving or if I have too few seeds to pop and I want to look even more that's the only time I'd recommend using a bunch of mails because when we're doing that the intention isn't a I'm gonna find a keeper and I want to know who made this keeper it's right I'm going to make more seeds and that's my only goal is seed making at this point not breeding it's making more seeds to run through and at that point whether you use two mails or five maybe it doesn't matter like me like it's you're gonna you're gonna be doing this for potential to run through as many as you possibly can and at that point it's the numbers game yep yep no good points they make a lot of sense well at this stage I think we've more or less covered the seed making side of things this is anything else you could think of with regards to just seed making and not you know not working generations or anything not at the top of my head no well here is where we have the opportunity to maybe gesture towards like a bit more of the breeding strategy side of things questions from digger and Eli, Eli is actually someone who is in a another discord with me and booze but the kind of like I've aggregated the questions together and so the scenario is this they're home growers and they can't keep clones so what is the best way to capture slash isolate slash lockdown either outlying traits or an outlier plant yeah as a whole like man not keeping clones and trying to lock down traits that it would be relying on pure luck right so none of the you know none of the typical breeding strategies will help you necessarily with that like it I can't think of anything off the top of my head and there may be something I'm forgetting but like you have to a mail to use him if he passes on the traits you like I mean granted you can get it right the first time like I did with blue bonnet right with the second round trying to get it right a second time is very lucky and I remember when with the second round I was super happy because it was so lucky usually the second time it's like gotta go back do it again do it again but it's always in the process of keeping clones with that mindset if you're doing selective breeding you really can't do selective breeding without keeping clones that's kind of a key statement here and I don't think it would that was very clear to me either because like you know there's obviously this common conception that like okay say I find one one of my plants in this you know out of one or two packs I love yeah I'll just self it but you have to keep on self it yeah you won't know you like it okay I wonder okay here we go okay okay okay okay okay okay re-vegging, re-vegging is the key so let maybe let me let's reframe this question so that it I think it will be more constructive let's pretend that either you have re-veged or while you may not have keepers per se you can keep something for a couple of runs okay maybe you don't have like mothers that you're keeping for years and years but maybe you have enough space and time that you can keep something for a shorter amount of time yeah I don't know that makes the question easier I mean yeah I mean what if you can keep a clone then it's just down to selective breeding and just treating for whatever traits you want and that's it it changes everything but like with the re-veg example you can get you can get creative with that but you have to be able to live with your plants in 24 hours light during one point so you can't have like you need to have multiple at least two multiple at least two spaces one for flowering one for veg if you're not keeping moms I'm assuming that you're probably not having a separate veg area by that question and that's the point like they only have one place to flower and veg maybe we do assume that they have separate spaces for the sake of the question but yeah and at that point it's just yeah I mean it's just a matter of time popping what you like keep a clone of the one you like you know use a male keep a clone of that if the progeny run the progeny if the progeny is good you have your kept male then you can drop him go on to the next lot you know the next filial generation and then you know select for the same traits find a male on that use him if he works great drop him you know after the next run or go back pop more of the f2 go through that another male pollinate it run the progeny etc repeat yeah does it change anything the fact that like again unlike a commercial reader on the largest scale you know you have a few plants to select from it doesn't really change the overall strategy though right it's still just working with the best of what you've got it's always the best of what you've got whether it's two seeds pop two females or 300 it's always going to be that process because when it comes to the males they don't display traits like the female does they're not it's not a visual trait that we can tell that it's going to do what we want necessarily sometimes sometimes it's not a trait maybe we're using a male for high maybe this line that this male come from has an extremely rare high and that's why we're trying to use it we only have a male from that line left you know yeah it's always the same process always the same process yeah okay so just I just want to make our reframing of the question clear because the original question was about not being able to keep clones which kind of does make this whole thing basically impossible yeah so we had to reframe it to be like well you at least need to be able to rerun something like a few times for this to to work out at all aside from Revej aside from Revej yeah yeah that would be that a simple answer would be Revej would be the key the first question I mean maybe just spend a few moments talking about Revej like is Revej fail proof it's not right like some plants don't Revej properly or do old plants Revej I have no issues with Revej but I've got a pretty good process down for it the idea is to make sure it has plenty of root space one because if it doesn't then there's other kinds of hormones firing off root bound and shit you're trying to deal with too many variables make sure it has plenty of root space if I'm going to Revej something I'm not worrying about harvesting the bud from it maybe I'll harvest a tiny amount just to smoke it and then I've decided oh shit this is great I need to Revej this at that point yeah because that's more likely the scenario of a home grower yeah yeah so the idea behind Revej would leave most of the bud is because when I Revej and I leave the bud it leaves more sites for new growth new vegetative growth to grow out of out of that bud that's right and when you harvest the bud there's a lot less places for new vegetative growth to come from a lot of times when people Revej they get greedy about their bud and they want to harvest their bud to smoke and if it's only a little bit they really want to smoke it that's my choice is this thing such a good keeper that I'm going to leave all this bud on it let it rot and go to waste just to get more vegetative material or is it eh I'd rather smoke the bud and not worry about it once again it's like a numbers game once again right the more bud sites you can afford to leave the higher the chances that you have a successful Revej exactly and the other thing is and this is the most important 24 hours of life and it takes about two months for a successful Revej expected to take about two months to where you're seeing some kind of good vegetative growth coming off that you can clone sometimes longer sometimes three but it's a long process it's a lot of electricity in some cases then you know but if you aren't keeping clones and you can't have a separate veg and flower space then Revej is your best bet that's the way to work through that okay okay so yeah the 24 hour lightning almost always ensures it for me almost always plenty of root space 24 hours light and plenty of bud sites you know or bud left on it just don't strip it bare and it'll do it how long does it take generally quite a bit right yeah two to three months sure it should be complete yeah yeah it's a long process but granted there's been so many times where it saved my ass so many times like where I'll take a clones of something be flowering something out and there's last few clones dying I'm like oh shit all I got is this last plant and flower that's a great case for Revej too and like you know like I'm a big proponent of it because it's very effective it works great and the thing that most people don't talk about with Revej is that it kind of sets the plant back to zero point like plants are like some plants that are more like slow not as vigorous they're tired from whatever disease you give it a good Revej and that plant will be back to vigorous and spry it's crazy like it does reinvigorate the plant somehow and that's just an experiential take not a scientific take but it's something I've noticed enough to where it's like okay that's something that happens and then it does and we've even we've even gone as far as making seeds and then Revej'ing that plant see how the seeds form during a Revej which is always interesting you can do that I remember from forum you know from my earlier days on the forums like monster cropping yeah monster cropping what is it you're using the Revej to like create much more plant mass yeah yeah biomass yeah it's kind of boofy to do it but yeah that's a that is a technique for sure but yeah Revej seeds, Revej seeds usually come out more hardy with thicker shells that's the one thing I've noticed and it does hold pretty true this is cool this has been a this has been a funny little side path to come down I didn't think yeah it is but that's actually quite fascinating Revej seed making okay well returning to this like original scenario of like I'm a home grower and I've got a keeper that I want to like try to lock in in a seed line basically which is now more just a general breeding question I wondered if you wanted to cover that that old territory again of like in terms of locking in expressions and traits the differences between like back cross reversal forward breeding outcross you know like is it worth this broad stroking that I know it's something that you guys have covered a lot but yeah I mean we're here I kid I'm trying to think of a best way to talk about this without having to go into the detail of the different generations and essentially just be like someone has a clone that they like and they want to reproduce it the quickest way to reproduce that clone or to get a version of that clone in seed the closest version to that because there's no way to make a mirror image of it in seed fast that's never going to happen that's not what S1s are that's not what fenced seeds are they're not clone versions of themselves in seed you know the other day I got a question from a breeder I'm going to try to rephrase this a little bit I got a question from a breeder and they were asking a seed maker that was asking if I make these fem seeds are they going to be clones of themselves like is this going to be can I tell the customers if you want to see a clone of this in seed by these fem seeds and I had to explain no that's not how this works a lot of people do have that expectation that a S1 or self line meaning a plant pollinating itself and making seeds of itself so there's not any outside genetics coming in it's just that plants own genetics it is not going to be a clonal representation of that plant to say you're not going to pop 10 of those seeds and they're not all going to pop and look just like that clone that doesn't happen and that's not how anything works and I think that a lot of people have that impression that that's where they're going to find the exact clone and it's just going to be just like the clone mother and even some seed makers have this idea that's not really how it works but if I were going to give someone advice and they had a clone they didn't know much about breeding but they had a clone and they wanted to make a seed line that was most representative of that clone and try to trap it in seed I would say go the self-trout as opposed to choosing a male from a different line let's say it's a fam line that they're running instead of choosing a regular seed or a male from a different line bringing an outside genetics and crossing it and having regular seeds I would reverse it using a reversal spray pollinate itself and by doing so you're not bringing an outside genetics so everything you're going to see are what comprises let's say if you're reversing bubblegum it's going to be everything that comprises the genetics of bubblegum inside that self-climb sometimes it might be all really close surrounding that bubblegum expression sometimes it might just be a bunch of earthy and bubblegum was the weird outlier and when I say outlier means you know it's only one in a thousand seeds you'll see this this pop up whereas the earthy sweet expressions are one in ten or one in two like every two seeds you're going to see that for sure but one in a thousand you're going to see this pink bubblegum expression that's what an outlier is yeah yeah and there if the odds are that steep what else can you do if the odds are steep like that the best method is to use selfing because you speed through the filial generation process much faster because you're not bringing in outside genetic material you're not working with new stuff that you're bringing in and trying to select away from whatever plant that is it's all working towards that single trait in what you'd want to do you'd self it you'd pop as many seeds from that selfing as you can until you found the one that is exactly like you like in that generation you take that selection you self that one and then you do it again and each new generation you're going to be getting much closer and closer and closer if you're doing good selections if you're bringing in the original clone in those seed each each round is going to be really tight and get tighter and tighter by the S4 you should be seeing like extreme uniformity for that specific trait you're bringing for doesn't mean that the plant is going to look like a clone of itself if you're bringing for the pink bubblegum trait all of them should have the pink bubblegum trait by about S4 yeah what are the tradeoffs here down there multiple self generations the major tradeoff is going to be inbreeding mutations because you're because you're selfing you're going to see all those those wild expressions come out to the forefront those those recessive genetics as we refer to them those one in a thousands are going to pop up and a lot of that is also going to be mutations and inbred traits that we may not necessarily want so the more inbred it gets each self generation might come with more trash involved along with what you want that's the downside that's a tradeoff makes sense as we say low flow or high ceiling yes that's right that makes sense as well okay now Ken what about forward breeding to try to do something similar like what are the differences here like does it take a lot more time to achieve similar results so forward breeding let's just assume we have a regular seed line of a single line just for example my blueberry incross which is like an inbred blueberry line and we have males and females of that that would be easy to do a worked line of regular just doing f1 f2, f3, f4 because it's a very uniform line as it is now let's say we have for example animal cookies crossed animal mints, pie you know what I mean like something that has like six strains on one side and six strains on the other and they're not related you're going to have a hell of a time crossing those running through all the potential expressions from this like 12 way polyhybrid trying to pick what you like going down the next route trying to go through that it would take so many generations just to try to make anything uniform because of all the traits that both sides bring which is why I would highly recommend in that case using selfie when it's a polyhybrid clone that you found that you like the quickest way, the quickest route is through selfing if you have a regular seed line of something filial generations that's the normal breeding method is just f1, f2, male female, male female, male female the only time we really use back crossing which is to say like if I have a blueberry bubble gum on one side and a blueberry on another side so it would ideally ideally be 66% blueberry, 33% bubble gum in genetics that doesn't mean that the expressions are going to come out their way but genetically 66% and 33% bubble gum 66% blueberry by crossing something that's already blueberry and bubble gum with another blueberry that's considered a back cross because you're crossing blueberry back onto something that already had blueberry in it the best times to use that most people like you'll see people selling bx4, bx5, bx6 with bx is the best thing that we found that it's used for is locking down a single trait let's say in this blueberry bubble gum I want to find a super blueberry type plant in this blueberry bubble gum so by crossing to blueberry again lock in that blueberry trait because let's assume this male is true breeding for blueberry traits so now I've locked it in in this hybrid now most of the time it's going to be true breeding for this blueberry scented trait you only need to bx1 one time to make that happen if you're using good selection there's no need to take it to a bx2 from that point you should either work at filial generations forward or self generations forward you don't want to keep working backwards using back crosses that's not how you lock in multiple traits you lock in multiple traits going forward this is now this is more or you know advanced breeding theory but the idea is lock multiple traits going forward lock a single trait going backwards you can lock in a single trait going backwards then lock in multiple traits going forwards yeah and yeah going forwards includes selfing yeah very nice that that's an excellent summary and I I don't think that um I've heard this account as like succinctly um as you've presented it here in like previous episodes I'm really glad that you you covered it there's a great paper there's an amazing paper um written by Kaimira and he's he's like I've talked to him about it he said I probably wrote that when I was drunk or something like it was okay it's called the the myth of cubing or like the myth of cubing in back crossing I believe yeah and it was one of the smartest papers I've ever read and he actually wrote a an addendum to it as well I can't remember where it's at but try to Google the myth of cubing in back crossing and if I can remember I'll put it in the description too but it's a great paper talking about the scientific uh like what's going on scientifically for back crossing in cannabis yeah amazing well we're kind of wrapping up but I think we did get a related question to this on like you know resources and reading uh Trevor Leahy from Brita Syndicate asked you know there's a number of articles that people have mentioned countless times like marijuana botany or marijuana growers guide uh how reliable and how accurate are they still and what would you look to gain from reading those in 2023 so marijuana botany is not a grow book by any stretch of imagination it is a breeding theory book and I wouldn't recommend that for someone to learn growing however if you're going to learn breeding in cannabis to this day it's still the standard granted Robert Mark has come out with a new book called marijuana ethnobotany and evolution written with Mark Merlin which is now the standard but it is a heavy collegiate textbook it is not meant for someone trying to just learn cannabis breeding it's not a good introduction it is heavy so marijuana botany is more theoretical less practical is that what you're saying no it's it's more it's just decorating you have to really understand breeding concepts and breeding terms to jump into the Mark Merlin book so it's more it's already taken for granted that you have some of that um knowledge yeah it's okay the best way to put it like if you've been through some science in a a junior college that book might be more for you the the marijuana ethnobotany and evolution if you're comfortable reading college textbooks that's how it's written like a college textbook uh that books for you marijuana botany is more for someone who doesn't read college textbooks but wants to understand breeding theory and its basics yeah as far as growing the like the Jorge Cervantes grow book and you know the Mel Frank one a lot of people started out on that and it did a lot of people a lot of good however growing's come so far so far even in the past 10 years it's leaps and bounds how how people have been able to get cannabis to perform and express is leaps and bounds like if you look at the old CENSI catalogs for seeds you see stuff being stuffed with nitrogen the gills just boofy no resin nothing today we understand how to grow plants a lot better and I think maybe those old books while they are great to have in your pocket for understanding some of cannabis and knowing like the pest stuff and knowing what to look for for like deficiencies and how the leaves look those are great but as far as learning how to feed there are so many more advanced courses now from different universities on the best way to feed cannabis and how it likes organic feeding there's also the revs uh tree living organics book for people that want to get into TLO but yeah I mean like there's online courses from universities on YouTube that are so much more advanced on soil science and soil biology that could really really like advance people's growing understanding I think that was probably where I would recommend starting as opposed to those books but those books are great foundation but for modern techniques some of the colleges and universities are just doing the most groundbreaking stuff with soil science and soil biology yeah I got you okay well we are in this final section of essentially community questions that didn't necessarily fit into any of our previous sections okay and I think one thing I want to signpost is that some of these are more on the breeding side and like Matt presented a couple of really rich dense nuggets for breeding but this episode was mostly about seed making so I think we also want to keep open the possibility of having a dedicated episode on breeding yeah I agree where we maybe talk more about like each generation and all that but I think it's important to go back over and redo that one yeah I think so yeah so we could definitely do that but for in the interest of like just answering a few more of these questions to wrap up some of these are pretty interesting loyga from syndicate asks what traits do you lose when selecting from small plants for example you can't select for outdoor plant structure large plant structure if you're growing in one gallon pots but are there any other traits that get lost if you are hunting through smaller plants if you're hunting through smaller plants some pest resistance maybe might get lost in the smaller plants or I mean they may even get attacked more you never know obviously structure yield comes into play seeing how far you can cause I imagine not all plants sorry to interrupt but I guess in terms of yield it would be that even though your plant yields X amount in a one gallon pot it doesn't necessarily scale in a linear fashion if you go up pot size exactly I mean there are certain things that I think you can learn about your plant better from smaller pot sizes versus just blowing it out and having the biggest yielding plant you can which is terpenes expression you can see a finer expression of the plant I believe in like a two or three gallon pot you can see so it's not being pushed too hard in any one direction but it's enough root space for it to perform but yeah you're obviously going to lose out on structure especially if you're growing indoor versus out they're just way too different like I'm not a proficient outdoor grower at all I'm an indoor grower and exclusively indoor my outdoor runs have been minimal and not even that great so yeah and I did want to kind of draw attention to one of those points you made which is that on terpenes and maybe like cannabinoid balance chemical compound balance in general does change with scale yeah absolutely I know you all have like mentioned that what is it like the blue dream at different scales performing very differently UK cheese you can get a thousand expressions from that plant I've told stories about how I've thrown away the same clone several different times that smelled different because I thought it was a fake cut because it didn't smell like my first smoking of cheese and then later on when I grew it a certain way is like oh this is the same berry plant but now it smells like cheese with the hell that's one of the most important things I've ever learned in cannabis was the plasticity of cannabis and how truly different it is and how hard it is to identify clones and different plants in flower through pictures yeah you know that's very rare to be able to do it comes back to that my earlier point that like of course you know we want to try to seek out as many clues as possible in advance of flowering something out or breeding something you know we're looking there's this tendency to look for signs right wherever they are and it is interesting it's an interesting game and that leads on to the next question from Maras it's an interesting one do you think that there are traits that tend to be overlooked in selections so we know that the most common ones are going to be like structure flavor, smell, potency mold resistance those are obviously really common ones are there ones you think are overlooked that may be a bit more minor but also quite important hi hi is the most important to me and it's not the most important to everyone but during the Instagram era I really feel like that's been the most ignored because you can't visually see it you can't pick it fast you know like you can't tell which plant has the best high really fast you know like while it's in flower how are you going to do that that's definitely one of the main ones because it's just not something our senses really pick up until we smoke it and it takes time to properly like test and smoke a whole crop of like 50 selections it takes even more time and how much time you want to devote to that and how much space you put in between each sampling of each high and what you're doing the mindset and set like all come into play so yeah I mean I don't know kind of rambling no I get it and I think it's this is a difficult question because like um I know for example I think not so as mentioned this like an interesting one that I don't know many people think about is that there may be a sweet spot for say flower density yeah yeah where it's like oh actually if it's too dense it doesn't smoke well if it's too loose then it's too loose right so it may be there's something in there but I think generally the main things that people select for it's pretty well covered right and well there's also there's also selecting against and people have selected against an intersex trait and I think that that's also detrimental the cannabis because there are things called link traits and some of the times those link traits might be linked to that intersex trait some of those may be traits like heavy volatile sulfur compounds that smell skunky and we may have lost a lot of that because people selected against intersex trait that's linked I mean that's one theory so there are many traits that we select against that maybe we are considering it but we're selecting against it and it may be hurting the overall gene pool oh that just blows open the degree of complexity here yeah you may be implicitly in selecting for something you may, sorry in selecting for something you may be implicitly selecting against something else that you don't even know about absolutely that's kind of mind blowing and that's why the progeny has to be run that's why it's so important to run the progeny because you just never truly know like with the for example with the blue bonnet mail the first thing that I used to select him was because was his purple stock stripes and just like the overall look because I remember DJ's blueberry mother clone that has somewhat of a blueberry smell and some of the other blue selections that I made over the years that are kind of blueberry muffin all had this look to it and this particular one had his leaves sticking 90 degrees from top to bottom all the leaves just straight up so I was like okay that's like him raising his hands that's as good as anything using that you know what little education I have with blueberry those specific traits that identified visually and then that I was like okay well this is as good as any to try then when I when I when I was dusting the room when I was smacking the mail I remember I had on this big face mask with the canisters on it usually you can't smell much of scent through that thing but I was smelling nothing but berry coming through when he was wafting around so at that point I knew that he at least has oils that that have a berry smell to them so that's a plus but even with all that I had no clue if he was really going to pass that blueberry trait until I ran the project there's just no way to know because in in using that purple stripe stock maybe even though he smells blueberry combining it with whatever potential females I have that trait on that plant locks out that berry trait so you'll never see it you know there's all kinds of things to take into account when it comes to that stuff yeah yeah so I guess the upshot from from that is we're not trying to say that like you can't use try to use early earlier indicators to help you narrow your search but just you have to know that there's no silver bullet and there's no replacement for actually running something out or it's progeny out sorry I should say yeah they're no shortcuts no silver bullet no shortcuts and there's no shortcuts better than knowing the line and running the progeny knowing what you're working with is super important so even if you haven't bred with it let's say you've run you know 10 clones from that same line for a year you'll know more about that line and its traits and its different expressions just from running those 10 different plants from that line over a year then you realize so when you go on to do this breed the breeding work with it you'll be like oh wait I know that trait I saw that so clone number 3 and blah blah blah all that comes into play and helps and people don't really realize it until after they're doing the progeny selection and that's when you start realizing all that time you spent learning those plants really and like how important it is when selecting traits it's so important yep yep yep great advice okay well we have a final question also from leuger are there any differences between breeding short and long flowering strengths yes um that's another multi tiered complex thing I mean it can go from like you know to where neville was saying like don't use haze males only use haze females because the haze males breed like trash you know that like people have these theories like that but overall when it gets to basics the main difference is going to be flower time and when you pollinate when you pollinate how long the seeds take to mature and how long the male flowers versus the female flowers and when they're going to go off that's the main considerations when taking into account seed making specifically nice okay well you know I think that's us we covered the sequence the specific techniques and steps of making seeds for regulars reversals, autos we covered some of the questions around isolation contamination prevention overall pretty you know pretty pessimistic risk averse response which makes sense most of my responses are going to be like risk averse and with sterility and like cleanliness in mind when it comes to breeding yeah yeah and finally at the end we got to measure towards some actual breeding strategy and techniques sorry strategy and theory and maybe we will do another episode that's dedicated to breeding yeah I think yeah I think that's a good idea and yeah I'm happy with this one so let's finish up I guess do you have anything you want to plug specifically or say again nah I'm good just happy to 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