Jul '24 (edited) • Custom Connoisseur Cannabis
World Class Cannabis Breeding Techniques part 2
So last time we discussed basic breeding. What a hybrid is, and how to stabilise a strain by selective inbreeding.
Now we’ll look at how to select and stabilise specific traits. Let’s say you cross a land race Indic’s with a landrace sativa. You then grow the f1 seeds out. Out of those seeds you discover an outstanding expression that you decide you’d like to stabilise. How do we do that?
Well there are a few options available depending on what you want to achieve. There is what we could call the traditional way, that allows you to create seeds that can be re-seeded for generations. This technique involves the use of males and females.
It is easy to find a female that has desirable traits obviously because the females produce the flowers that are the final product. What is a bit more tricky is identifying males that are of the same expression as a chosen female.
Some ways we can try match a make to a female is by looking for the same traits in both plants. This seems obvious, however when the flower is the main goal and flower traits such as terpenes and trichomes are extremely important, it can sometimes be difficult identifying a male that would contain those genetics, without the male ever producing a bud.
Males don’t make the “buds” we want so it hard to know if they have the genetics that will produce female offspring with the buds we want. So we really only have every other trait to try and match a breeding pair. So besides the female flowers, we’ll look at leaf size, shape and colour, plant overall structure, internode spacing, petiole colour, smell when stem is rubbed, growth habit etc.
Matching those traits will give us the highest chance of finding a male that has the same genetic expression as the female. After that we plant the resulting seeds and look for any female phenotypes that express that traits we are after, then find matching males and makes seeds with only those selected males and females.
As each generation is made, the selected genetic expression will become more dominant until a balance point is finally met where the consistency and vigour are equal. Any more inbreeding after this equals dipping into generic depression and that’s a bad thing. That’s why we often go to around f5 in traditional breeding. After that we may germinate seeds from an earlier generation kept in store and work those genetics into the live to rejuvenate some vigour.
In the next instalment, part 3, we’ll look at a more modern breeding technique that offers many impressive opportunities. Feminized seed technique.
Warrick Duncan co-founder
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World Class Cannabis Breeding Techniques part 2
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