AtomicElectric
New member
I'm getting ready to try out some auto-flowering, feminized seeds. Besides ear hair, this will be my first growing experience in twenty-five years (midlife-crisis grow). My two strains will be White Widow and Blueberry, both from ILGM.
I'd like to use some of the seeds I'm ordering to breed more seeds for future grows, and I want to maximize the genetic fitness of the seeds I breed (avoid inbreeding). I've already got some ideas on this, but it would be great if readers can tell me if I'm on the right track or off-base in my thinking.
To start with, I can't really be sure what exactly will be going on with the seed's I've purchased. Presumably, they will all be female seeds, produced with pollen elicited from a female plant. I suppose if the original breeder had genetic fitness in mind, they would have at least made sure that the pollen came from a plant other than that which was producing the seeds, and the less closely related the parents, the better. (Anybody know how breeders tend manage this sort of thing?)
Within the two strain-batches of seeds I'll have, I won't know if the seeds are full siblings, half-siblings, or just related at the strain level (by way of cousin-lovin'). That being the case, I'll be hesitant to produce my own seeds by breeding any two seeds from within each batch, even though that's how I could theoretically keep the strains pure.
So the option I'm considering, for the sake of genetic fitness more than anything else, is to breed a Blueberry with a White Widow, utilizing the colloidal silver method of producing pollen. My understanding is that the two strains should share the same auto-flowering gene (auto-flowering is a function of a single gene, is it not), and that since both parent's will by homozygous recessive, the seeds produced by the "mother" of the pair should be uniformly feminized. (Is this assumption correct?) Any seeds that end up coming off of "dad" through self-pollination I'll consider have a higher inbreeding factor, and so be inferior in terms of fitness, and I'll either discard those seeds in the neighbors carrot patch or at least keep them separate from mom's seeds.
From the seeds that I produce, I'd of course expect quite a bit of phenotypic variation, since in every family some kids look and smoke like mom, some hit the brain like dad, and some just lay you on your back like the pool boy. (Unless one of my other plants is spontaneously synchronously monoecious, there shouldn't be any pool boys wrecking the family.)
So, where am I off in my thinking and what other factors I should be considering? I'm just hoping to end up with a nice size bag of healthy, feminized auto-flowering seeds from my effort.
I'd like to use some of the seeds I'm ordering to breed more seeds for future grows, and I want to maximize the genetic fitness of the seeds I breed (avoid inbreeding). I've already got some ideas on this, but it would be great if readers can tell me if I'm on the right track or off-base in my thinking.
To start with, I can't really be sure what exactly will be going on with the seed's I've purchased. Presumably, they will all be female seeds, produced with pollen elicited from a female plant. I suppose if the original breeder had genetic fitness in mind, they would have at least made sure that the pollen came from a plant other than that which was producing the seeds, and the less closely related the parents, the better. (Anybody know how breeders tend manage this sort of thing?)
Within the two strain-batches of seeds I'll have, I won't know if the seeds are full siblings, half-siblings, or just related at the strain level (by way of cousin-lovin'). That being the case, I'll be hesitant to produce my own seeds by breeding any two seeds from within each batch, even though that's how I could theoretically keep the strains pure.
So the option I'm considering, for the sake of genetic fitness more than anything else, is to breed a Blueberry with a White Widow, utilizing the colloidal silver method of producing pollen. My understanding is that the two strains should share the same auto-flowering gene (auto-flowering is a function of a single gene, is it not), and that since both parent's will by homozygous recessive, the seeds produced by the "mother" of the pair should be uniformly feminized. (Is this assumption correct?) Any seeds that end up coming off of "dad" through self-pollination I'll consider have a higher inbreeding factor, and so be inferior in terms of fitness, and I'll either discard those seeds in the neighbors carrot patch or at least keep them separate from mom's seeds.
From the seeds that I produce, I'd of course expect quite a bit of phenotypic variation, since in every family some kids look and smoke like mom, some hit the brain like dad, and some just lay you on your back like the pool boy. (Unless one of my other plants is spontaneously synchronously monoecious, there shouldn't be any pool boys wrecking the family.)
So, where am I off in my thinking and what other factors I should be considering? I'm just hoping to end up with a nice size bag of healthy, feminized auto-flowering seeds from my effort.
