How do you choose a good mother/pheno from seeds.

[EcstaticErratic]

Hi all, new to the site.

I have some Potter Valley Kush seeds that im growing... (I know all of you are probably wondering what the hell this strain is.) Humboldt county local strain that i got here in SoCal, and it was fantastic smoke.

I got a bunch of great and viable seeds. I recently germed 10, 5 days in 6 of them are beefy, hairy, and have strong root systems. hopefully all 10 make it to veg.

When they get to Veg. how will I know which mother to pick. If two or more of them have similar growing speeds and strengths what else should I look for?

I guess I might have to start a GrowJournal for my girls and show you what this strain is all about.

 

[bounty29]

If you want to do it the right way, you'll need to have a rooted clone of all the plants before going into flower. Once you get to flower, if all you're looking for is a keeper from your seeds, get rid of the males and the corresponding clones as soon as they show. Once you do that, grow out the females you have, and keep notes about growth rates, feeding, etc. Then, you can harvest and smoke all the plants, and decide which was the best overall, and keep the clone of that plant for the mother. Flower the clones of the other plants out, or throw them out, whichever you'd prefer, but by the time a whole flower cycle has gone by you'd have some decent sized vegged plants that could give you a good amount of bud. The next time you grow out your "keeper" you'll know if she's picky about nutes at any certain stages, how she reacts to any training you did the first run, and stuff like that. You will only have better results in your 2nd, 3rd, 4th grows with it.

 

[swampdank]

couldnt have put it better myself bounty. welcome to canna-info heaven E.E. sometimes finding a certain plant that you wanna keep for a long time can be a long painful process. let your personal taste help you decide which ones you wanna keep. does your chick burn?? which one does she like the best?? better keep it around for her. stuff like that man. good luck.

 

[EcstaticErratic]

yo bounty, thanks for getting back to my question.

alright so let me recap and rephrase just to make sure i get the process.
grow out all seeds to veg.. clone each plant and determine sex. toss out all males and corresponding clones. grow out females and take specific notes on the females. out of the females i choose a keeper. grow out the clone of the now mother and take notes of specifics in all the different stages.

is there any other details?
i should know about.. experiences etc.

 

[bounty29]

yo bounty, thanks for getting back to my question.

alright so let me recap and rephrase just to make sure i get the process.
grow out all seeds to veg.. clone each plant and determine sex. toss out all males and corresponding clones. grow out females and take specific notes on the females. out of the females i choose a keeper. grow out the clone of the now mother and take notes of specifics in all the different stages.

is there any other details?
i should know about.. experiences etc.

Follow that plan through and you'll have some TOP NOTCH bud. That's where you "dial it in" and learn to grow it perfectly. Just think how much better the keeper will be when you've grown it 5 times and know everything it likes. The more you grow, the more you can experiment with different treatments, and you can track how it reacts to everything.

I'm flowering Blockhead right now, and it's my first time, but I've got three cuts going. I'm going to finish all three slightly differently, and since they're very similar sized cuts, I should be able to see which of the three finishes it reacts best to. What I'll be doing...

Plant 1 - Day 65, 2 day flush
Plant 2 - Day 63, 1 week flush
Plant 3 - Day 70, 2 week flush
(Plant 2 and 3 are in the same container, this seemed the best way to get two different results from one container)
(You can find "normally" in my first post in my Blockhead thread)

I've had a few different pieces of advice from people that have grown this strain before, so I'm putting them all to use and see which one works best with my situation. I get to see a variety of harvest times, as well as I'll get to see how this particular cut reacts to a flush, ranging from 2 days to 2 weeks. I'm sure for people with larger grows it's a much larger task to keep track of everything, but you can find out so much more with each run. I think it will help my grows in the future, that's why I'm doing it.

I'm only running 3 cuts, just think if you ran 20 cuts and treated them each differently in one single way. I think you'd learn what your cut likes very quickly.

 

[TREE KING]

wouldnt it be alot easier to just take a clone off the best plant after its in flower in convert to veg? as long as you have seeds or clones for the crop after that then that would give you enough time to convert the clones to veg and grow em out as mothers.

 

[bounty29]

Well do you want ease, or do you want quality? The whole reason I'm growing is so I can have quality. Seeds are all different, and who knows how the perfect strain you're flowering reacts to cuts taken in 12/12 and revegging? Having backups are good, you never know what seed is going to give you the PERFECT strain.

 

[TREE KING]

bounty29, if the plants survive the reveg and show no hermies is their still a chance the plants might not have the same vigor or something? are you just talkin about the plants surviving or other things as well? im curious because you know more than me about this

 

[bounty29]

If you want to learn about revegging, I don't know anyone with more personal experience (That I know of) than DrBudGreengenes. He's usually very willing to help, and can be found in chat a lot. He's revegged plants and grown them out and flowered them up to three times before, to top it off this is done in a 20oz container.

All I meant is that ideally, you have a rooted backup of any plant you put into flower for the first time, so that if anything goes wrong you can start over, and if it's something worth keeping there's no chance you won't mess something up and lose it for good.

 

[TREE KING]

but what about after the plants survive the reveg? theres a risk they wont be as good after? thats my main concern. im about to plant 250 seeds and i was dreading having to take 3-4 clones off each one. that would be insane work! but on the best plant in flower i was gonna take like 20 clones off it to make sure at least 1 would survive the reveg.

 

[bounty29]

But how will you know which one is the best until after you've harvested, dried, cured, and sampled all of the different plants?

After revegging - Talk to DrBud, I don't have a lot of experience.

 

[TREE KING]

im just gonna go by looks and yield. yield is the most important to me but i dont want the quality to get degraded because of the reveg

 

[bounty29]

How will you have any idea of how they look and yield if you take clones before they've even completed flowering? I agree though, getting 250 plants cloned and everything would be quite a hassle. What are you growing out? Is there a certain pheno you're looking for, or just looking for the best of the batch?

If I had any questions I needed about revegging, there's a few pretty in depth threads here, and like I said before, DrBud has decades of experience.

From what I've read though, it doesn't seem like there's any loss of quality. If you're just going to reveg and use as a mother or reveg and take cuts for a mother, I'm sure you'd be fine, as long as the reveg was successful.

 

[TREE KING]

im growing out killing fields and mikado. im mainly looking for the biggest yielding purple pheno in killing fields. i can pretty much get the picture a couple weeks before flowering is over. and if theres 2 or 3 to choose from then il clone those. is DrBudGreengenes on these forums all the time? if so i was gonna send him a pm

 

[bounty29]

Yeah he's very active. Good luck!
http://www.icmag.com/ic/member.php?u=30088

 

[TREE KING]

thanks

 

[EcstaticErratic]

swampdank,
my chick burns, she likes potter and we have smoked a few different batches enough to know that its a good strain. hopefully i can master the strain and cross it with something elite.
I'm looking to get some clones tomorrow.. and i might be starting a growjournal, keep posted!

Bounty
keep a rooted back up of all females. grow all females out and while paying close attention see which one grows the best without disease etc. after flowering yield harvest, you have copies of every one of those to choose your mother from.

reveg and changing flowering and veg cycles back and forth are forms of stress you can also test plants with? can strong plants do this with ease and low stress?

 

[bounty29]

keep a rooted back up of all females. grow all females out and while paying close attention see which one grows the best without disease etc. after flowering yield harvest, you have copies of every one of those to choose your mother from.

reveg and changing flowering and veg cycles back and forth are forms of stress you can also test plants with? can strong plants do this with ease and low stress?

Stress them any way you can, the more you stress the more you learn. Just like any experiment, the results are only good if you have a control.

 

[Kinderfeld]

There is no need to clone the males... just veg until they show sex, then take clones of all females and # them. Then proceed to flower and root. By them time you know a winner you should have just enough cuts for another go given proper lighting.

 

[TREE KING]

i thought plants only showed there sex in flower? pollen sacks start showing in veg?