How to select a variety of Cannabis
Selecting a “personal” type of Cannabis takes time and patience.
Selecting means above all choosing and therefore excluding. Let’s see what is best to select, choose and what should be excluded.
First of all we must start from the parents, and we know, if we want healthy, robust and productive children, we must start from parents who have these characteristics.
You can start either from famous strains on the market or from unknown seeds but the really important thing is that the starting plants be particularly successful in your climate or in the conditions you will offer to your plants.
If we want dwarf plants we will start with short but strong and productive parents. If we want tall plants we will choose parents that have a tall stature.
It is relatively easy to choose the females because they are the ones we cultivate the most. We want to choose plants that are always robust and resinous, productive and that have not become ill or that have not shown signs of diseases They will be the best mothers who will transmit these characteristics to future generations.
How to select a male? It is important, if not fundamental, to choose a good sire that has the following characteristics:
Late flowering: among the other males it will show later the sex, (we speak of males born from seeds planted in the same day).
Robust plants that defend themselves from pests without being over-treated or taken care by us.
Plants that exhale particularly interesting aromas and give off strong scents at the touch.
Then discard weak males, without any smell, who tend to show themselves weak because you risk to bring weak genes into future generations.
Collect the pollen of the males on a sheet of aluminum paper and isolate them from the females, you will just have to open 4 or 5 male flowers to collect enough pollen. You can also freeze it in the freezer and use it later, sprinkle the females that have white pistils and choose three or four florets (top parts) to be fertilized with a small brush. At the end of flowering you will see the cups (calyxes) swell and contain the precious seeds.
In order to remember which top you have dusted put a ribbon around the flower or anything that you find suitable. The seeds thus obtained will be called F1, which is the first starting generation of your path to create a personal strain. Store them in the dark, in a dry place and away from heat sources.
The plants that will be born will have mixed and very interesting characteristics. Now start again to discard weak plants, those that get easily sick and proceed with the same criteria applied the year before. In this way you will get ever stronger and more productive plants until you are going to be able to fix the characteristics that you consider more interesting (coloration, scent, times of entry into flowering, compactness etc). Always note the characteristics of the parents and the times of growth.
Over time you will see your plants increasingly independent and productive, discarding the undesired characteristics, for a natural process of improvement, you will not have to worry about taking care of your plants too much.
As a rule of thumb it is good to plant at least 20 seeds at a time as a starting number but if you have less it is also ok The number of seeds grows exponentially over time.
If you continue at this rate, until you’ll reach the F7, you will have stable plants with homogeneous characteristics, perfectly adapted to the place where they have been grown, and you can also decide to give a name to your personal genetic line. The stable plants that resemble each other preserving a small margin of almost imperceptible diversification are called “pure line”, that is, they derive from seven generations (minimum number) of in-bred plants, bred between themselves without an intrusion of foreign genetic material. These plants are also known as IBL (In Bred Line). You will then have to check the crosses, choose, select and exclude! Good job everyone!