New Grower Understanding breeding autoflowers

[AverageBowler]

Hey guys, been growing regular and femenized seeds for years, last year I bought some auto flower seeds, and when one of my reg's turned male I pollinated the auto and gott a good amount of seeds.

I want to back cross these seeds and try to get my own line of autoflowers going.

It's to my understanding that of these seeds I pop, some will be fem, some male, and some auto. I will then take the male's pollen and pollinate the auto plant to create my first back cross. It's then repeating this process a few more times until the majority of these seeds are autos, between 5 to 9 times.

This is my understanding of crossing and breeding autos, what information do I have wrong and what do I need to do to start creating my own autoflower strain!! TIA

 

[Susitna]

That's quite a rabbit hole lol, but there is a good amount of info in this section on the process if you dig around. But I'll try and answer what I can.


When you say pollen came from a "reg" Im assuming they were regular photo period plants. And not regular autos? Hopefully not a fem that hermed lol.

For ease of communication on here anyway, regs normally refer to non-feminized seeds, either photo or auto. Ones that produce normal male and female plants.

Photo is dependent on daylight hours for flowering and Auto is daylight neutral, flowering in a set time frame rather than hours of light. Fast flowering are usually photos that have some auto lineage causing them to flower earlier but are still photo period dependent.

Sorry if you're already aware, just making sure we are on the same page :smoking:

So to your question, if the photo male was a true photo with no fast flowering genes, and the mother was auto, then the seeds you now have (F1) should all be photos as well(male and female) when grown out. Sometimes you will get an occasional auto in the F1 because genetics are wonkey.

If you take those plants and breed them together, the next(F2) generation should be about 25% Autoflower regular (male and female). If you just breed that 25% together with each other, the rest of the plants down that line(F3) should be Autoflower since it's mostly a collection of recessive traits.

So really it only takes 3 generations to get all auto's. But, genetics being what they are, there are often anomalies so its a good idea to breed another couple generations to weed out random photos.

Of course then you have to think of all the other genetics that got jumbled around in the process, just because you have auto's now doesn't mean they are good or what you want. If you are trying to make an auto version of the photo plant it takes a few times back crossing the auto's you make with the original parent and going through the process again lol.

This is why so many auto's aren't the same as the photos they are made to be like. Takes quite a lot of time(years) and work or tremendous luck to do.

All that being said, if it's fun and interesting then do it! That's why we're here after all.