Hey all! Started my first breeding project recently and decided to use a landrace strain from Real Seed Company called Mazar-I-Sharif. i'll put the info on it below. I got a lot of them as freebies with orders I made, they were ex stock and so the germ rate was meant to be low, but so far I've had 60% germ which was better than I expected. I thought it'd be a good idea to plan out what I want to achieve from this breeding project, make a list of aims etc so I have an idea in my head of what to follow with each step. Any advice or criticism is more than welcome as I am still new to this stuff so definitely don't be afraid to correct any mistakes I'm making or have made. Anyway hope you enjoy the show! Darwin Aims: * Grow #1 * Grow out a sufficient number of girls and boys to get a good representation of the natural population's genes in the first set of progeny. * Open Pollinate all plants grown (might collect pollen from males as they will most likely mature before females do - if collected, store in freezer, drop in front of fans in front of all the girls at week 2 and week 5) * Examine all plants closely taking note of different phenotypes to select for in the future (no selection will be done in this first grow at all it's just for sufficient seed production to start grows for selection). Take vigorous notes, pictures, etc of phenotypes/traits, will help for future selection. * Because of numbers i want to use and size of my grow space currently i'm going to SOG (Sea Of Green) style grow them in single colas, or if there's enough room i'll just prune when light isn't penetrating well. size and yield of plants at this point isn't important, i just need as many plants grown as possible to reproduce an produce seed with as big a gene pool as possible. * Grow #2 * Now it's time to focus on selection. * Look for individuals with the best phenotypes/combination of traits (more than just one selected trait per plant). Better to choose fewer plants with more of the traits you want in each plant than twice as many plants with only 1 of the traits per plant you're after – this will save time selecting as the offspring are more likely to express these traits. The more plants used, the more you will to look through to find the best combinations, the quicker you can breed for and stabilize these traits. * Cull down numbers to ~3 Males and ~3 Females to cross or open pollinate. * Grow #3, #4, #5, etc repeat Grow #2 etc. * Follow this process until you have one or more lines of stabilized phenotypes you have selected for (ie. all progeny in each generation resemble parents phenotypes, each consecutive generation of progeny should comprise a great portion of parent phenos until it reaches 100% = stabilized). Depending on what phenotypes arise, i may want to produce a few lines, ie. if there are 2 different smells like lemon and pineapple, i might like both and create a lemon line and a pineapple line. This can be done for any traits you desire, just have to work out what there is to choose from first. ULTIMATE AIM – produce IBLs from multiple landrace strains (mazar-i-sharif being only one of many) to eventually hybridise. here's the info on the strain. here's one of the first mazar beans to pop out of the soil
You ar eon the right track. Very well planned. What you are doing is an inbreeding(IB). Since you are using a land race variety, you will find that they will grow fairly true from the beginning. Here is what I would suggest. First, do not pollinate the whole crop, you can get plenty of seeds from just pollinating a few flowers on selected females. I would look for females which seem to have the traits you desire, and/or some unique phenotypes. These will be the females you pollinate. It is good to number the females you select w/ a note of why you selected it: such as: fem #1 smells like berries. Your male selection will be a bit more complicated, but you want to look for scent, how tight the clusters form, and hollow stems. Keep a small amount of pollen using the tutoral here in the "Breeding Section" to collect your pollen. Take a Q-tip, or you can just drop some in a zip lock baggy and attach it to the flowers on the females you select. Allow it to set for a few hours, then carefully remove it. Mark these flowers with a twist tie or something. These seeds will be the offspring you want to begin your isolation process. In other words, you selected these females for specific traits, so you will want to isolate these traits from the offspring. I am sub'd and will be very interested in this project. If you have any questions, just hit me up.
thanks a lot lessismore, won't it bottle neck the genes if i start selection strait off the bat and only pollinate a few girls with only a few males out of all of the ones i choose? leaving me with fewer possible phenotypes and traits to select for in the future? i'm hoping to eventually create several IBL from every landrace strain i have depending on how many decent phenos arise that are worth stabilizing etc and then creating hybrids of 2 or more of my IBLs of indica and sativa to create my own marketable strains - it may seem like i'm jumping in the deep end because i only just joined up but i've been researching the crap out of this stuff on other forums as well as through books etc and doing a fair few grows indoors and setting up a guerrilla one since the start of the year with my best mate who's also a part time grower. so feel free to blast me with complex breeder talk is what i mean to say i'm an evolutionary geneticist doing post grad at the moment too so i've got the genetics stuff down pretty well now, definitely interesting stuff. though i'm sure i've 10 times as much to learn still! anyway yeah i was just thinking if i open pollinate everything i'll get a huge amount of seed as well as keep the genes mixed up, in a huge number of phenotypes to select from the next round, as well as have probably 100s of seeds for later if i see other phenos show up that i wanna go back and select for. but yeah if you think what you explained is better, i'm definitely up for hearing a bit more about it and why etc, sorry for the essay reply ! thanks again mate darwin
Since they are already land race, it would seem an open pollination would not yield anymore different phenotypes than what they can possibly produce now. From what I have seen and heard, The Real Seed Company has very true breeidng lines of the land races they offer. Since these are true lines, it would not make any difference IMO when it comes to variations of phenotypes. So I would do my selections on the first run, thus giving you a better group to select from in the offspring produced. If you do not want to go through a selection process, I would at the very least only pollinate with one selected male to give the offspring a more solid genetic structure. The reasons people do not like land races are the fact many take longer than most hybrids to flower, they can grow rather wild and be unpredictable, and/or can be genetically unstable. By selecting a very stable male with good traits would take some of the instabilities out. The offspring will still produce a variation in phenotypes b/c remember; phenotypes are 50% genetics and 50% environment. So your variation in phenotype will still be there, you will just have a more stable line in your offspring to work with. Male selection IMO is more important than female selection. I use male selection in almost every stain I reproduce, be it land race or hybrid b/c it makes the stabilization process easier in the long run, as well as you do not have to worry about mutants and oddball traits one may not desire in the lines. By being selective of at least one parent, you are creating a much more stable line in the offspring.
very good advice mate, and i'm leaning more towards doing what you're saying now. i might just see how things go, i've plenty of time to think about it before having to worry about it haha but yeah thanks a lot for taking the time here mate much appreciated!
Another thing you want to consider on this, is your yields, and quality. Why pollinate the whole crop when you can selectively pollinate various flowers so you get some very fine seedless flowers out of the batch. Why waste a whole grow on seeds? I neve ropen pollinate even when doing seed grows b/c I do want some of the harvest for quality smoke. You do not need much pollen, nor many female flowers to produce literally 100's seeds. A couple decent flowers in the middle or towards the bottom of several females will give you alot of seeds. I usually do a couple flowers on each plant, so I get at least 80-90% seedless flowers; plus I usually get 30+ seeds from each flower i pollinate.
yeah i know what you mean, i guess i'll just have to be more diligent with pollination if i do that and use a paint brush or bags away from others etc. then water down after a few hours to kill left over pollen
hey all, had some great advice from a friend last night about germing seeds, i have left the seeds in wet paper towel for about 10 days and had about 60% germ, i didn't want to waste the rest so asked about techniques to up their chances, one was cracking them gently open between your thumb and index finger (mine were pretty hard so had to use my nails for some) anyway did that yesterday arvo, went and had a look today and i've got an extra 12% that have germed over night! great technique! so far getting close to 70% germ rate.
so within a couple breeding projects if you keep the ambient temperatures really high will they develop higher heat resistence enought to warrant spending your time doing it. mabye thats how mandala seeds do it ....i dont know. i heard doing that is not a good idea but mabye its different for fresh seeds like yours.
the first part about selecting for heat resistance is definitely fact, that happens naturally so it'd be easy to do artificially. the australian strains that are considered landrace but aren't really, those that have been here for 100s of years and have grown wild, definitely have evolved to deal with our harsh climate at the top of nsw. strain called mullumbimby madness is that one that grew along a river in about 90 or so acres for 150 yrs untouched with natural selection acting on it and i believe it become pretty heat resistant and arid resistant. the cracking of seeds i'd only recommend with seeds that you've tried germing and are 10 days or older, as it may damage them so no point doing that to fresh seeds, but if you're going to throw them out anyway and they haven't germed then you might as well give it a go. i had another few pop bring the % to about 20% increase now. so it's worked pretty well for me.
been trying to come up with the best way to grow sufficient numbers in a reduced space (like a closet/tent). i've been looking for the best pots to fit side by side and keep as much space for soil as possible (round pots are really bad for this, square pots are better but still truncate at the bottom losing some soil volume for surface area used). anyway, i drink a shit load of juice and blended up fruit/vegies in smoothies and it came to me the other day (i'm sure i'm not the first ) that i could use juice bottles! i always buy brands that sell 2-3L squared off juice containers and i'd be able to fit a shit load side by side in rows and columns in the closet and/or tent and lose pretty much no volume at all because they're the same width and length all the way up. good thing is local supermarkets have juices on sale pretty much all the time, worst comes to worst i could go the homebrand stuff (though it's normally arse), but they're often ~$2 for 3L. so today got the first of many, for about $2.50 each (cheaper than pots of the same volume), i'll have to unleash crazy on the juice each day to get through enough and then cut the top off and put some drainage holes in and voila 3L pot! i should be able to pack these in nice and tight against one another if i need to as mazar-i-sharif seems to grow single cola style without much branching out so will be a nice sog style grow. here's some pics,
yeah great idea bro i didnt have enough pots for all my normal seeds so i just cut 5 2L bottles of water in half.......heat up a corkscrew really good and make drainage holes in the bottom......vuoila mini pots.....its too bad all my kalichakra died though.....heat stress