Alright, I'm gonna throw a curveball here and begin a discussion on something I've thought about for a long time. I'm from the Northern Midwest USA and we have wild hemp that has grown here for a very long time. If you grow outdoors pretty much anywhere around here your going to get your plants pollinated by some of the pollen that flies around for miles and miles, even if you only get slightly seeded no matter what you get a few seeds.
The best way to guard your plants is using cornfields as a shield, find a chunk of land or an island in the center somewhere. In our area you rotate crops every year so a field will be corn this year and then beans the next, ect. The years your surrounded by corn you get way less beans then if the field around you was beans. I got it down to a science, if I had to guess I'd say I get about 10 seeds in an ounce if that, while most of my buddies looks like some mexi brick loaded with seeds.
The Feral Hemp that grows wild around here has been open pollinating itself by natural selection for ages, it's terpenes are really stinky, gets loaded with trichomes, tastes good, but has pretty much zero THC. This is "ditchweed" or "headache weed", ect. Its been grown here naturally for so long its acclimatized itself for my area and is strong, great pest and mold resistance, and flowers early and on time to make sure it finishes its cycle before the cold winters, naturally.
Many of outdoor growers around these parts who have depended on starting with fresh seed year by year have lost their gene pools because of the Feral Hemp pollinating their lines year after year (example for my area is the Roadkill Skunk).
Say they start off with a nice 100% Afghan and grow it around here. Well year after year of letting it breed and pollinate outside you get the Feral Hemp in your genes and eventually it over runs your line and you end up losing your potency, before they know it they are growing a strain thats Feral Hemp dominant from being backcrossed to the hemp so many times. I don't know if they even understand whats happening, I just put 2 and 2 together after wondering why growing up all the weed from the outdoor growers that used to be killer is all of a sudden bunk.
The clone growers don't really have a problem since they are using their cuttings every year and the Feral Hemp is only pollinationg it once and they aren't growing the seeds. A person recieving it would smoke the buds and think its bomb and are happy they found a few seeds in their sack. They could easily grow them beans and find some nice plants and also probably some sub-par ones.
This all leads up to some of my thoughts, kinda hoping to dig into the minds of some real breeders. I've always pondered the idea of creating a stellar outdoor speciman for my area or using the Feral Hemp for the outcross to eventually breed back to the original clone I was using. Everything I'd have saved would be 1 time crossed.
For example lets say I grew some Bubba Kush and naturally it got pollinated by some Feral Hemp. I'd have Bubba x Hemp, I could take those seeds and have the males pollinate back to the Bubba clone. How well do you think the Feral Hemp would work for the 1 time outcross? From there consistantly select Bubba male phenos to pollinate back to the Bubba clone repeatedly.
I also wondered about the ones I've saved of the clones I no longer have, like say OG, Cheese, Urkle, ect. I grew all those clones outside and they got lightly pollinated by the hemp and I kept some of the beans just in case I ever needed them for anything. How effective would it be to grow some Cheese x Feral Hemp and select only Cheese phenos for future inbreeding? While doing any of this one could stumble across a pheno with the original clone potency with some of the growth characteristics wanted from the Feral Hemp, like earlier flowering, more yeild, ect.
Here is a little video clip so some of you can get a better understanding of what I'm talking about, its pretty educational and interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5IQ2PrSWG4
Discuss
The best way to guard your plants is using cornfields as a shield, find a chunk of land or an island in the center somewhere. In our area you rotate crops every year so a field will be corn this year and then beans the next, ect. The years your surrounded by corn you get way less beans then if the field around you was beans. I got it down to a science, if I had to guess I'd say I get about 10 seeds in an ounce if that, while most of my buddies looks like some mexi brick loaded with seeds.
The Feral Hemp that grows wild around here has been open pollinating itself by natural selection for ages, it's terpenes are really stinky, gets loaded with trichomes, tastes good, but has pretty much zero THC. This is "ditchweed" or "headache weed", ect. Its been grown here naturally for so long its acclimatized itself for my area and is strong, great pest and mold resistance, and flowers early and on time to make sure it finishes its cycle before the cold winters, naturally.
Many of outdoor growers around these parts who have depended on starting with fresh seed year by year have lost their gene pools because of the Feral Hemp pollinating their lines year after year (example for my area is the Roadkill Skunk).
Say they start off with a nice 100% Afghan and grow it around here. Well year after year of letting it breed and pollinate outside you get the Feral Hemp in your genes and eventually it over runs your line and you end up losing your potency, before they know it they are growing a strain thats Feral Hemp dominant from being backcrossed to the hemp so many times. I don't know if they even understand whats happening, I just put 2 and 2 together after wondering why growing up all the weed from the outdoor growers that used to be killer is all of a sudden bunk.
The clone growers don't really have a problem since they are using their cuttings every year and the Feral Hemp is only pollinationg it once and they aren't growing the seeds. A person recieving it would smoke the buds and think its bomb and are happy they found a few seeds in their sack. They could easily grow them beans and find some nice plants and also probably some sub-par ones.
This all leads up to some of my thoughts, kinda hoping to dig into the minds of some real breeders. I've always pondered the idea of creating a stellar outdoor speciman for my area or using the Feral Hemp for the outcross to eventually breed back to the original clone I was using. Everything I'd have saved would be 1 time crossed.
For example lets say I grew some Bubba Kush and naturally it got pollinated by some Feral Hemp. I'd have Bubba x Hemp, I could take those seeds and have the males pollinate back to the Bubba clone. How well do you think the Feral Hemp would work for the 1 time outcross? From there consistantly select Bubba male phenos to pollinate back to the Bubba clone repeatedly.
I also wondered about the ones I've saved of the clones I no longer have, like say OG, Cheese, Urkle, ect. I grew all those clones outside and they got lightly pollinated by the hemp and I kept some of the beans just in case I ever needed them for anything. How effective would it be to grow some Cheese x Feral Hemp and select only Cheese phenos for future inbreeding? While doing any of this one could stumble across a pheno with the original clone potency with some of the growth characteristics wanted from the Feral Hemp, like earlier flowering, more yeild, ect.
Here is a little video clip so some of you can get a better understanding of what I'm talking about, its pretty educational and interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5IQ2PrSWG4
Discuss
