Bob's Journey into Hybridisation and Genetics - For Dummies

[Emerald Archer]

Tuned in! I am loving the Breeding convos that go on here.

 

[Bob's Auto's]

Tuned in! I am loving the Breeding convos that go on here.

Welcome brother! This will be quite the journey...
Finally got my hands on some real Meph gear to play with. And also very exiting to play with some regular auto's. Hope to find me a nice male which I can put inside the tent so it's isolated from the greenhouse. With that pollen I'll be able to selectively pollinate some females inside the greenhouse, so I still have some sinsemilla to smoke and some seeds to play with.

 

[Crow River]

Hey guys,

Again a small update as I needed to take a picture from my DIY cob light for someone. While I was at it I thought, well why not take a couple of more pictures.
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These soon to be men are approx. 10 days old now so they still have a good 10 days to go before I start my STS treatment.
Am I correct in assuming this timeframe @Sawney_bean?
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This soil wasn't packed chockfull with nutrients as I'm trying to be the worst grower possible. I'm am going for the strongest male in there of course.
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These pouches are wonderful. They keep their strength and even airprune the roots as they emerge through the soil towards to fabric. Oh and they cost close to nothing. And I payed something like 5€ for 100 pieces... Well that's a no brainer
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Whenever the light is creating those lines while photographing I need to keep one hand between the subject and the light, this stops the flickering, but show's the color of the light the plants are next to....
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And this is why I needed to go to the tent, actually lung room... This is my DIY COB light setup I used before I got the way more efficient TS-1000.
These are three 50W cobs. One being 6000-6500K, the next 380-840nm and the last one 2900-3100K. They shine amazingly bright, but also create lots of heat. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's not... For me, it's creating a small issue with the temperature inside the tent, but this was easily remedied by turning down Wattage of the light and turning up the extraction fan.
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And inside the tent the White Widow is finalizing the male sacs. The moment of extraction is very...mhmmm how should I say it...You don't want to remove the branch to early as not all the sacs will mature and that will come to a cost with viability and quantity. But remove the branch to late and, well...Need I say more...
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This is the top part and has the most perfect male sacs. So I predict these will soon pop open.
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Ah...We've come to the end of the line for today. Hope you enjoyed your stay

I am arriving very late to this diary, I'm enjoying it immensely so far. I'm curious why you decided to reverse a fem rather than growing regs? Is it because you are looking to make feminised seeds? Also, what are those fabric pouches? Look interesting for large seedling runs...

EDIT - Found the pouches on fleaBay. Total bargain!

 

[Bob's Auto's]

I'm curious why you decided to reverse a fem rather than growing regs?

It was because I couldn't get my hands on any regular auto's at that time. And to be honest, using STS is a synch to create female pollen and then the resuling offspring is female only. Win-win, no? Yes and no. Yes, because it's easy to work with female's only. Especially if you have room shortage, a legal max. number of plants or just because it's illegal.
And no, If you want to start breeding and take everything into account you just need males to play with. For instance, there's still loads more that can come over from a male candidate, which a female can't give and so, many allele's stay dormant and will not get to express themselves...Genectically speaking you double you chances in finding something special if you include males. Another popular method to eplode the amount of genetic expressions in a F1 generation is to use regular photo's to use into your auto breeding program.
Whereas a auto x auto combination can deliver on average of four phenotypes, the use of a photo x auto will give you more then sixteen phenotypes out of many more genotypes of course.
Another, not so popular method these days, but popular in the 80's is using the juice from a plantbulb, in which you soak the seeds before germianting and this will induce, if done right genetich mutations, ie, a triploid, tetraploid or any multiploid. There's research been done with triploidy and they found out that CDB will be amost double in a triploid offspring from a diploid motherplant. The funny thing is the THCa is almost diminished, which is of course not what we're after, but still a tech to follow up on...I've got all the ingredients in house behind lock and key, yup...it's that dangerous stuff ☠


For now I've got 15+ crosses made with a regular male and so, have loads of regular seeds to play with.
Again which to thank my buddy if he's reading this

The first will be the Wedding x Mystery male cross...Let's call it Dirty Wedding Cake F1 or DWC F1 for short...Which I'll be using this season inside the greenhouse to selectively pollinate some branches from selected females. I'm not going to try an pollinate every girl in the greenhouse as I've done my homework and want to improve upon certain treats and not create plethora of phenotypes and loose track of things. So to take a new step and not a leap, I am starting by crossing a auto fem ♀ x auto reg ♂ and see what the resulting offspring will produce.
In my SOG experiment I found out that sixteen plants is enough to find one or two special ladies, but we all know this is a numbers game. The more plants you can set and handle each, one at a time, the easier it gets to find two or three examples of that one or two peno girls...Anyway, I'm rabling...

I've germinated six seeds yesterday and took a small peek at the cotton pads this evening and saw that almost every seed on the plate did germinate and had a small to medium sized tail. Probability says the DWC F1 should be 3♀ & 3♂. And since they are F1's hybrid vigor will be high with these offspring.

 

[Antonio_DutchPassion]

Interesting stuff as always... Cross breeding autoflowers with photoperiods not only gives you much more phenotypes to deal with but also a difference in autogen - photoperiod gen and fast flowering pheno's (with some auto genes in it). To fully stabilise such crossings you will need to do several cycles of breeding to get rid of the photoperiod gen (in the case of creating a new fully stabilised autoflower variety). All is possible here, but as always in the world of breeding it takes time and a lot of work.

Like you say, the bigger the amount of plants you work with the higher the chances you will find something special/unique and a plant with the traits you are looking for. But that doesn't mean you can't breed with smaller numbers, like 5-20 plants, you just need a little more luck/research to find that special one, and in the worst case scenario you need to pop some new beans to find the one.

Sounds to me like you are going on another nice adventure! and enjoy the experience mate!

 

[Bob's Auto's]

Hey Guys,

Guess I fell asleep last night, lol...
Oh well, let's pick up where we left off.
Guess the genie is out the bottle by now...
Ahum, Ladies and Gentlemen, proud to introduce to you DWC F1, offspring from Mephisto Wedding x Coal Miner's Daughter.
Four out of six germinated with a nice tail, two others just split open and then stopped...So four germs/sprouts have been sowed into the lightmix.

The same happened for all the other germs/sprouts after which they got covered up with some extra fine lightmix and then hydrated with pump sprayer.
The count:

• Mephisto's Wedding x Coal Miner's Daughter 4/6
• Mephisto's Wedding 2/2
• Mephisto's Wedding x Forum Stomper 3/3
• Double Grape x Toof Decay 2/2

The others aren't meant for the breeding project, but for the Dutch Passion Grow 'n Show

Did some very important work today...
I decided to multilply the stock 'living' soil I had tucked away. Some of you might remember the fiasco in the beginning of the SOG thread...Well I still had that soil in a bin, after my missus used up about half to plant some herbs in, which is ok...Soil enough right? I also had the remainder of the soil I made up at my last ánd succesful go at the SOG, which was also half a bin. Both had different bacteria in them, but the bin from inside has predatory mites which hunt the springtails, which caused my first two attempts at the SOG to fail
Anyway, so about 70L of 'active' soil was dumped on a large tarp in the garden, well the sun was shining and the missus was home, so the garden it was....
On top of that went three bags (210L in total) quality potting soil. Also had a bag of lightmix (approx. 50L) left over from sowing the seedlings and other seeds, which I might dicuss here further if there's any interest into the subject of other plants then our beloved ladies...
Added 20L perlite to that and 80L bricked coco, which I hydrated first with 60L water.
To prevent issues with the addition of the coco I added 200gr Calcium Nitrate and 200gr Magnesium Sulphate. During the cooking process these nutrients will get attracted to the coco fibers and the leftovers will help the young plants to get nice green leaves.
I also added some extra Calcium (200gr) in the form of seashell chalk, this is a slow release one form of calcium which the plants love. And to aid even more in the total health of the soil and plant I added 400gr Diatomaceous earth. This last one provides the soil with a buch of minerals one of which is Silicium. The small microscopic constructs are also a perfect binding spot for bacteria, which will be protected by their sharp outlines...An amazing product diatomaceous earth

This above mix got tossed and mixed up on that said tarp and then divided over the four bins. The remarkable thing is, the bins are supposed to be 70L, but my calculation would have me got 430L of soil mix...So who took my 150L of soil?

Anyway, I ended up four bins filled with this black gold. Tomorrow I'll be putting the bins inside the greenhouse where they can cook a bit longer. I can't go on anymore, my back is killing me
Inside the greenhouse are still two bins filled with the soil from previous season and I also have three bags of quality soil left over and a 300L bale of compressed coco. So I won't be running out of media anytime soon.

Regards,

Bob

 

[Bob's Auto's]

Fast update...Just placed the germination tray inside the tent*. Saw that several sprouts had emerged already, so they needed to get under some decent light. I've set the light at 25%, which is on the cautioned side, I know

I stuck the humidity / temperature sensor inside the germination tray. As this is where the younglings are.

I didn't want to risk the other sensors getting wet, so I cut a small hole in the lid so the cable could fit and voilla

After everything has stabilized I'll upload a screenshot from my Blynk app
Oh, as I'm a stoner I really can't remember who gave me the idea, but my microphone stand arrived today.
Someone used this to stablize the photo's taken with an USB-microscope. Now, my hand is fairly steady, but wouldn't it be great if I could make a timelapse of a trichome forming? food for thought
Anyway, you unknown hero of mine. Thanks again for the idea. I'll try it out as soon as I get the chance

Regards,

Bob













* Well, the tray almost didn't make it...I slipt and lost my balance while going up the stairs. So down I went and all I could think of was..."Keep that tray stable!"
I slided on my belly until I got stopped by the ground floor...I've got grazes all over my body and a nick in my chin, BUT the tray stayed more or less level during this entire debacle and none of the seedlings has filed a complaint, so I think I'm fine
No really, I couldn't have forgiven myself if all those seeds were mixed up. That would have been a disaster for sure!! I already kicked myself in the head today after finding small pots the size of the planting space around each sprout...
But all's well that ends well

 

[Sawney_bean]

More adventures. Brilliant

 

[Redeye Master]

Wow I’m late to the party lol banging job there Bob!

 

[WildBill]

@Bob's Auto's
Have you noticed any compaction in the bottom of the trash can storage and cooking?
I like to turn my media often to keep plenty of oxygen in the mix.....old habit from making tons of compost at a time. My covered back porch is lined with totes with media. LOL! Totes just make it way easier to turn .