Pollen in veg

[Unspecified]

Hello I have some males from some seed runs I wanted to keep to make some reproductions and explore the gene pool in future.

I had 6 boys and 4 of them have decided to flower in veg, producing lots of clusters of balls up top and fully formed sacs dropping pollen lower down.

While kept in small pots in coco I don't think they've been stressed and my timer cycle is fine the other 2 still just have the small claws forming at the nodes no sac development.

I've discarded the males that have flowered and dropped pollen as I assume this is the right course of action? I'm not interested in auto flowering genetics.

Does this happen often with males? Can they be delayed with indefinite veg like mother plants?

I have no experience with male plants and judging by the vague or basic/lacking information online not many people do, is there any good reading on males anywhere beyond the snippets of wisdom breeders like dj short have shared when sharing their advice?

 

[MROrganicGreenz]

How many hours of light in veg? What genetics? Indica/sativa? From what u say its not just preflowers? Indoor or outdoor? Is there a possibility of cross-pollinatio through hemp around you or auto flowering malen/hermies?

Could it be, that the genepool has auto genetics in it, so by recombination it appeared? But 4/6 would be pretty high.

 

[Unspecified]

18/6 light cycle indoors.

I've never kept males previously or done any breeding just looked after my mother plants (some 15 years old).

I'm having more time to breed or get in to it at least so there's a lot of new things to me when it comes to dealing with males.

Edited to add, the genetics I'm going through at the moment are all 10+ years old some germination issues, mostly skunk crosses, 3/5 males have gone like this and 1 Jack herer based cross. The other 2 that are fine are skunk.

 

[Unspecified]

I came across this on another forum after trying various different search terms, I'd appreciate some input from experienced breeders as to the validity of these claims and my experiences, it looks like I have 2 type 1 males and had 4 type 3

I can’t write very long with references and pics etc …, bit rushed, but you have first to distinct three specific behaviors with males :

1 - a male that just show preflowers at nodes and that continue to veg

2 - a male that have been triggered (by accident or something else) in flowering stage and that don’t stop when back in veg (18 or 24, doesn’t matter it’s hormonal at this stage)

3 - a male that truly flower under 18/6 or 24/0

 

[MROrganicGreenz]

So I am not a Specialist, but by what you describe I would agree with you. Let's assume, that the posted content is accurate. Therefor Type 2 would be very unlikely, since it happened with 2/3 of your sample. But there are some things to consider. We cannot outrule biotic and abiotic factors just from your short describtion of your setting. Furthermore we have no idea about storage of the seeds and what they have gone through. One cannot know, how seeds/plants react, that are "that old". Seeds that were stored inproperly for 10 years tend to act strange in some ways. Epigenetics is a hitword, that I have no time to get into deeper.
There is a lot of information missing and one can never know, what's going on over a short forum post.

In my honest opinion: you maybe threw them out a little to hasty. Considering all factors you can not know for sure, that they were "autoflowering", since there is a lot of room for bias. Also there is always 2 parents in a cross so its not for sure, that the early flowering dominates. I would have said you should give it a try, depentding on the space you got. You never now what recombination gives you, before you saw F2.

So in the future, maybe just keep a little pollen in your freezer and when there is time and space just give it a chuck

Regards.

 

[Douglas.Curtis]

There are many triggers for flowering, and one of them happens to be the situation of being root bound. Since you're in small containers I would look at that being the culprit first.

It's a rather handy trait for production work, since you can tailor the size of the pot to determine when flowering beings and how big the end flowered plant will be.

 

[Unspecified]

Hi @Douglas.Curtis

Thank you for the reply I have been reading your thread on STS as I'm interested in that route also, great stuff, thanks.

On the notion of pot bound, I don't think that's the case, I keep all my mother plants in coco in 9cm pots drain to waste and never had a female plant become unstable or discontent, coco seems perfect for this as the plants remain a good size for cuttings and they don't dry too quickly.

The other 2 that haven't balled up are still very much happy and just showing the nodal claw preflowers, the skunk lines I'm working with are probably not the most stable, they come from a time when pollen chucking was a viable market and you had to look for keepers with a bit more effort but due to the genetics involved you didn't mind.

I have hundreds of seed to work through from years of collecting so my modus operandi currently is to be ruthless, my main selection criteria currently is stability, I'm not looking to bottleneck anything at the moment and when I do so it will be separately stored lines from my STS runs when I get around to that eventually.

 

[Douglas.Curtis]

Glad to help.

Another trigger is low pH, which 'could' happen in coco when it dries out too much. You're running DTW, so were there any periods of time where those specific plants may have dried out more than the others?

 

[Unspecified]

@Douglas.Curtis

I've been growing in coco for 15 years multiple feeds a day I learned pretty early on where to keep things.

I think it's a real shame how undervalued the male of the species has been that there has been no evolution of information so that we could ascertain behaviours.

 

[Douglas.Curtis]

Good job

Someone needs to accumulate everything available on cannabis, and I mean everything, and use machine learning to reveal the gems. I'm pretty sure the information you're looking for will be one of them.