Ok say you came across an older strain that you wanted to preserve/hunt/generally fuck around with.
You have 10-20 seed
What is the best way to preserve the strain?
I'm thinking popping all of them in a breeding tent and letting all males and females grow and do their thing and make a whack of seed.
Is this the way to go or would you pick out phenos you like and breed them.
Generally, preserving a line is achieved by open pollination of all males and females. This aims to keep the genetic potential of the line as open as possible to be able to pull the widest array of phenotypes that are still considered the strain you’d like to preserve.
The moment you start selecting phenotypes to move forward into the next generation, you’ve moved from pure preservation, into imparting your breeding preferences to the line. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, especially if you only intend to generally fuck around with the line.
I think of preservation as an attempt at conservation of a genetic line and the breeder’s selection process inherent within. You’re serving a custodial function for the genetics and seek to replicate the potential of the line. If for example you’d like to preserve Deep Chunk, but only choose to use the “Green phenos”, would it be considered preservation to have excluded the “Purple phenos”? Are you conserving the line as Tom Hill bred it, or have you now narrowed the genetic potential to favor the pheno, you’ve deemed best? Again, there is nothing wrong with this, just trying to differentiate preservation vs. breeding.
You’re best route will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’d like a bigger population of this line’s seeds to hunt, or would like to keep the line going as a service to the community for other potential breeding projects, I would open pollinate. If you want a killer representative pheno of the strain that fits your growing/smoking, then be more selective.
I can think of a few approaches to consider:
- Open pollinating all of the males/females and keeping the harvested seeds separated by female phenotype – this allows you to at least control which female seeds you select to pop while still having the other phenos’ open pollinated seeds.
- Flowering the males separately from the females, collecting/mixing their pollen, and dusting single branches of each female. This will allow you to have open pollinated seeds while keeping most of the females as sensi bud to give you an opportunity to smoke/assess which female phenos are superior. Like the above approach, you get to have a fully open pollinated population, but with better info about which female pheno best suites your taste since you get to see their unseeded growth and smoke test.
- Be more discerning about which male plants you use, cull any that seem inferior or select one male that best represents the line and use the single branch method. This is less preservation and more breeding as you’re now narrowing the gene pool, but is only restricting the male side of the equation.
And on the same topic. Does the strain change as you f1-2-3-4 it. I have herd of inbreeding but haven't done any research. Any insight will be helpful.
I wouldn’t say the strain necessarily changes, but it will converge on a specific set of traits based on what you select moving forward. You instinctively understood this when you asked if the best way to preserve is to open pollinate. Since your goal is to preserve the greatest range of expressions this strain offers, you keep the population as large as possible to avoid bottlenecking the genetic potential.
Let’s assume your strain throws 2 main phenos: one tall long flowering pheno and one short fast flowering pheno. If you select only the short fast flowering phenotypes to make seeds, your resulting plants will skew far more towards the short/fast expressions. It’s still the same strain; you’ve just greatly reduced the occurrence of tall/slow phenos of that strain. This isn’t really “changing” the strain so much as narrowing the possible expressions.
Preservation seeks to maintain the widest potential for genetic expressions of a strain. In contrast, inbreeding seeks to lock down a specific genetic expression of a strain.
Inbreeding usually refers to either successive: filial breeding (
sister x brother), self-pollination, or backcrossing (
parent x progeny). This takes many generations with the goal of having seeds act like clones, such that every plant pops out
practically identical.
Having a firm understanding of what you’d like to achieve can help guide you on which route to take.
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