Preserving Genetics While Observing Plant Limits?

You have 30 seeds of a unique strain. Some of the plants will auto flower, a very few won't while under 24hr lighting. You have a 6 plant limit for flower and a 6 plant limit for veg.


While I'm not able to do this presently, the possibility of farming it out to excellent do'ers does exist. What I'm looking for is the best way to preserve as much genetic potential as possible.

Also available is feminized pollen from one female previously reversed.


Would you sprout 3, collect all pollen from males and reverse at least one branch on each female? Pollinating any females with itself and pollen from any males or reversed females available. The goal being to preserve genetic potential from each seed which becomes a plant, adding it to the global pool of pollen to pollinate the additional seed plants.


What number of growing couples, should they have the ability to share pollen, would be the best number to make this an easier task? I'd really like to get this done before the seeds get too old. lol

Ideally 3 males 3 females. But we all know the luck of the draw rules. So you get whatever you get. Not many folks have ideal breeding programs. I'd feel better about seed from good parents than nothing at all.

I guess you could grow 5 crops back to back with 6 plants while saving
the pollen from each grow just in case one grow has no females.

Personally id pop all 30, fuck it. I figured ive been doing it for years anyways...
But thats no help.

What if you pop 6, flower, veg another 6. Clone females, give to the other person to hold and veg. Pop another six. Collect all male pollen, then take back the vegging females and pollinate after the fact? This would give you an 18 plant selection.
Hoping thr cloning would slow auto flower.

Or you keep 12 plants and collect pollen to dust on you second round of ladies for better diversity, and have the other person do the same thing. Just save pollen and dust females 6 at a time adding any new pollen with males incurrered at time of flower.

Lol hope these make sense, dont know if i explained it well.

I agree with jact. There's no one going door to door checking plant numbers in legal states, so as long as you're discreet, exceeding plant counts shouldn't really be a problem. I'd probably do 15 at a time though, just to make sure you have some originals in case of a catastrophe.

If you want to keep it at 6 flowering plants at a time, you could perform 5(ish) separate open pollinations including reversed pollen from all females.

Culling any undesirable plants and saving pollen from every individual will help to clean up the line and work toward a more complete open pollination for the last run of 6 individuals.

With good record keeping, you could end up with 4-5 somewhat bottlenecked lines to select/line breed from and combine later to restore vigor, and one batch of essentially open pollinated seed from six mothers pollinated by 24 other individuals (the last 6 would need to be big and the pollinations well controlled to make sure everyone gets their genes in).

I was just trying to be stick with OP's 6 plant legal limit.

Once the males are gone the numbers would be a lot lower anyways.

What are laws again.

I just noticed that I may have restated both of your suggestions in a more detailed way. I do like the idea of working multiple lines of the same strain though. But that's less preservation and more improvement/breeding, which, like disregarding plant count limits, isn't what Doug was asking about.

Hope I was helpful anyway, Doug!

Go big or go home

Whatever others do is their own, I keep my plant numbers in check. I'm a dedicated family man, and prison makes it extremely difficult to support a family. Yes, djimb, you were very helpful. Thank you.

Definitely not culling anything, straight preservation yes.

I greatly appreciate the suggestions. With preserving the male pollen, and reversing and preserving the female pollen from every plant, each set of 6 being flowered will preserve more genetics.

So, at the end I should have 6 massive plants pollinated with all the pollen from every plant, along with seeds from each individual plant. Hopefully a LOT of pollen as well. lol


Any suggestions on how to use the collected pollen and seeds from the first few plants, to further preserve diversity?

Some can have peace of mind going over the limit. I've been thru all that so it's no cake walk going to court.

It just takes more time to pop less beans. Yet indoors, you are limited by the light. So 30 tiny plants verses a few larger plants is only a genetic variable.

Rest assured there will always be seed banks.

An unique strain which auto flower? Is it Zamal?

I have not done it myself but I have read somewhere you can mix pollen from males with slightly toasted flour. You will have a greater amount of material and it is as efective for pollination as unmixed pollen.

I think the best way is to do an open pollination wiht the biggest amount of plants, but I see you are llimited in numbers.

Perhaps you can grow 6 turn to flowering and save pollen from the males and cuttings from the females and make seeds. Keep clones of the females in vegetative and complete the number allowed with more seedlings. And make more seeds again, and keep more pollen for the next run.

Also you can do... grafting!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4ZgoluP5Ns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting#Approach

https://fusionbonsai.wordpress.com/page/24/

https://fusionbonsai.wordpress.com/category/acer-buergerianum/

How do they tell if you have one plant or 5-6 fused?

Id be like bruh wat am i to do with all these seeded buds..its for fishing bait obviously..

Ahortator, grafting isn't a bad idea. A bit more complicated than saving pollen, but it would still give you the opportunity to create greater diversity than having all your seed containing half the genes of six individuals. And with approach grafting it would be less effort than spraying CS every day or mixing STS (assuming you're as poor a chemist as I am). Still, It's a more experimental approach that's way less well documented, and success isn't guaranteed.

I guess if you wanted to ensure a greater overall diversity while using the pollen saving plan, you could do a second round of pollination using your P2 seed and all your saved pollen. That would reduce the genetic contribution to the next generation of seed from your final 6 plants to 25% and allow the combination if genes from previous stages. Or if you do mini open pollination for each group of 6, you could do subsequent seed runs with three seeds from two different parental groups.

Just spitballing...

edit: it occurs to me that grafting night not be as ideal a solution for plants that autoflower. It would present the same challenges as keeping clones. Though, now I do wonder whether the autoflowering is triggered in the apical meristem or the roots. If It's initiated by hormones produced in the roots, it could be circumvented by grafting an auto scion to a photo rootstock, much the same way that various fruit tree rootstocks can inspire precocious fruit set or dwarfism. That's a discussion for another thread though.

Douglas.Curtis said:

Whatever others do is their own, I keep my plant numbers in check. I'm a dedicated family man, and prison makes it extremely difficult to support a family. Yes, djimb, you were very helpful. Thank you.

Definitely not culling anything, straight preservation yes.

I greatly appreciate the suggestions. With preserving the male pollen, and reversing and preserving the female pollen from every plant, each set of 6 being flowered will preserve more genetics.

So, at the end I should have 6 massive plants pollinated with all the pollen from every plant, along with seeds from each individual plant. Hopefully a LOT of pollen as well. lol


Any suggestions on how to use the collected pollen and seeds from the first few plants, to further preserve diversity?

Click to expand...

Why massive plants? If its for reproduction and preservation, throw those babies in one gallons, and insta-flower (or slight veg, more seriously.). You still get hundreds of seeds. Small to mid range or seeds is more than reasonable, and saves time.
By all means though, whatever makes you happy is best thing. Respect and good luck.

Diversity and plant limits just don't go together.

You could pop the seeds in waves, save pollen, and pollinate whatever you can with whatever you have.. but you'll still never hit the first females with the last males, if you can't have more than six plants.

Long story short, your efforts would be better spent focusing on IBLs where you aim for 3 female - 3 male breeding schemes, or 6 females with freezer stored pollen... What all your explained efforts will produce are various IBLs anyways, and mixing them together wont necessarily mean you've kept any significant amount of the diversity that you began with.


You could make several IBLs with your beginning crosses, isolating different traits into various lines, to recombine them later and stay true to the cross while reintroducing some hybrid vigor.. but genetic preservation with a government plant count is a joke, honestly.

Unfortunately, cloning will not be possible with most of the plants since they have a very short dark period for flowering. Most will auto-flower at some point anyway.


I'm wondering what sane legislation for breeding would look like in Colorado...

Douglas.Curtis said:

You have 30 seeds of a unique strain. Some of the plants will auto flower, a very few won't while under 24hr lighting. You have a 6 plant limit for flower and a 6 plant limit for veg.

While I'm not able to do this presently, the possibility of farming it out to excellent do'ers does exist. What I'm looking for is the best way to preserve as much genetic potential as possible.

Also available is feminized pollen from one female previously reversed.

I'd really like to get this done before the seeds get too old. lol

Click to expand...

Douglas.Curtis said:

Whatever others do is their own, I keep my plant numbers in check. I'm a dedicated family man, and prison makes it extremely difficult to support a family.

Definitely not culling anything, straight preservation yes.

I greatly appreciate the suggestions. With preserving the male pollen, and reversing and preserving the female pollen from every plant, each set of 6 being flowered will preserve more genetics.

So, at the end I should have 6 massive plants pollinated with all the pollen from every plant, along with seeds from each individual plant. Hopefully a LOT of pollen as well. lol

Any suggestions on how to use the collected pollen and seeds from the first few plants, to further preserve diversity?

Click to expand...

Douglas.Curtis said:

Unfortunately, cloning will not be possible with most of the plants since they have a very short dark period for flowering. Most will auto-flower at some point anyway.

I'm wondering what sane legislation for breeding would look like in Colorado...

Click to expand...

I should keep my yap shut, since all *I* do is plan for the day when I CAN grow...still, I think about things like this a lot. Be surprised, how many nights I don’t sleep because I’m rethinking, polishing, streamlining those plans...and as a family man, emeritus, I’m more than sensitive to your point on that front.

With your indulgence, let’s see if I have any thoughts that aren’t just stupid

What I’m riffing off of is the wondering about sane laws here:

Your first post says the plant limit is 6 in veg and 6 in flower, which is frankly far more generous than I thought. It’s an interesting situation because it ignores dormancy...which is a sessile state: the plant is alive and healthy, but is neither growing nor flowering, and is the state in which bonsai moms are kept, sometimes for years. It also, strangely, ignores infancy, the seedling stage.

These plant states are odd gaps in the law, from the sound of it, but might be key to your idea of ‘fostering’ some of your mums with the neighbors (is that what you meant by ‘excellent doers’?) Since one of your questions was about sane limits for breeders (and I certainly intend to be one myself), this bears thinking about. If these gaps in the law haven’t surfaced yet, they will without doubt. It’s counter to common sense and common law - which is seldom talked of but is basic to our system of laws, and is in fact incorporated into our system - to have a vaguely specific law that leaves blind spots like that. Cases like that get overturned all the time, in an honest court.

As a family man, it likely wouldn’t do to lean hard on the gap, but with everyone and their dog growing, it’s bound to get pushed, and something will fall over, and it will go to court. At that point, activism will be crucial, with education (yes, *still*) - this time regarding the needs of the non-commercial hobby breeder. If I were in CO (and I may be) when this gets tested, I think I would push for an allowance of 12 “starts”, since not all seedlings make it and every farmer and gardener knows it - and in Colorado that’s a lot of people. Likewise I would want to be able to hold a MINIMUM of 6 dormant, but preferably 12. As breeding stock, it should be straightforward to make the point in a farm-heavy state that these plants at both ends of the age spectrum are NOT “in production”, and so should not be counted against production limits, or held to those same numbers.

From that standpoint - that these limits WILL be challenged with regard to starts and dormant breeding stock - what can be done with your gear in the meantime?

From the sounds of it, the pressure is not just what can you do, but how fast can you do it. I understand you concerns about seed age: I’m sitting on a few thousand bagseed from various bags spanning the 80s into the 90s, so I spend a lot of skull time on the question of when is too late.

So: 30 seeds, no discards. Six plants in each of two production stages, constantly rotating in and out, unique genetics, and it sounds like you want to pollinate every plant. As you want to preserve the genetics you have, and as I know from your posts you are meticulous about things (at least cannabis-related), this will mean that you have a massive issue regarding record-keeping: for someone with as great a care for quality and results and the details that spell success as you have shown, I suspect losing track would be a big effing deal for you. This leads me to my first cockamamie idea.

You need to design the data tracking before you start popping those unique seeds. The design needs to be flexible enough to accommodate changes, which are inevitable (kids, if nothing else). The matter is already complicated enough, from your questions, and it will only get more complicated the longer your project runs, so you’ll need to *start* with accurate tracking of each seed, its progeny, its parents, its pollen, its filial generation, whether it’s selfed, whether it failed.

For best results, I recommend a system that tracks each seed from first crack, to its last scion, in a way that illuminates the connections between generations and within generations. Speaking as an old data analyst and programmer I swear that however daunting this seems, it will be worth everything if it saves you from losing track of the project: deciding knee-deep in the clusterfuck that you should’ve been more careful, more precise, more exacting on the front end is too late. Most endeavors that wise up late are already out of business, they just don’t know it yet.

But time...there’s that ticking clock. Unique seeds. My second crackpot idea.

There *are* OLD seeds that get wasted and lost every day, irretrievable genetics never to rise again. It turns out that old seeds - I mean 30, 40 year old seeds - get popped and grown (not every day, but still). There are a lot of “getting seeds to pop” threads here, most of them are the same, but there are exceptions. Search on “vintage Mexican” (without the quotes, of course): the OP has dredged up a lot of good players and run a lot of experiments, and the entire thread is worth taking in. I won’t keep you in suspense, the clear winner in those efforts was germinating in fresh, live worm castings; 100% or close enough. Frost queen is a forum member worth paying attention to - at least she comes across as serious and clearheaded and experienced.

There are a few other tricks I’ve run into that I feel pretty confident would raise the chances for success with old seeds, too.

And if you knew some friendly soul who might be willing to share some of their ancient magic beans for you to practice on, it might give some rest to your soul on the matter and let you clear your head for the planning phase.

To recap: plan your tracking and record keeping in advance, run it on paper, like a fantasy football league or something and make sure you don’t go off the rails in the further generations. Before you commit the project to it. And consider the actual age and condition of your seeds, and the methods that will support their survival, *before* urgency pushes you to short-circuit the planning and get going.

I should stop before I prove myself a daffy old fool, but I have one last hare-brained notion or something: if you want to maximize pollen use, filial breeding, etc. with limited plants, your only way may be to - as you say, reverse every female and self-pollinate at least a few branches of each with their own reversed pollen; while it may also be that you have no male in the first twelve seeds you pop, you can *still* pollinate a branch of each female with pollen from each of the OTHER females as well as with its own. In that case, you would have all female seed, but you will have crossed these sisters to each other...and *when* you find a boy, you can pollinate each of the other five by him, and by each of the sisters in the then-current generation. And don’t forget that if you reverse a boy branch, you can pollinate him with himself - and he will give you male seeds as well as female....and if you reverse one of his branches for each of the F1 females, you can also begin back-crossing, strengthening and stabilizing as you go. With all the original genetic content carried forward, available to continue the project - which, really, could keep you happily stoned and busy for the rest of your life, all by itself, if it goes well.

But that’s the kind of data I’m talking about: like a later Heinlein novel, you need to keep track of who slept with who, when, who got pregnant, by who, and when....

Assuming you actually *like* the smoke these plants produce for you...

It’s an exciting prospect, and I envy you. I hope this has sparked some interest and been of use, and I’m sure I’ll hear about the ridiculous things I’ve said.

I WILL stop now. If any of this makes sense to you please feel free to reach out here, or in PM. I’m more than happy to go on like this for hours, and it would please me to see you succeed.

It’s 1 AM there: I hope all is peaceful in the house, and that you are sound asleep. Thanks for your patience. Time for me to wind down

Say fuck it and do a open pollination on all 30 at once. Sweat it out for a few months. You’ll be fine.

People aren’t knocking on doors checking grows. Let’s act like we all did this before it was as legal as it is. And if you haven’t, get a taste of what we all went through.

For real though pop em all and do your thing. It’s literally the best and only way to preserve everything..

And for the family comment... a lot of us have families. If you think can’t handle the heat it’s understandable... so do the right thing and let someone work those beans that can get the job done. If it truly is unique. They deserve a open pollination.

You could graft, two or three different plants on each foot to lower amount of plants.
Plants without roots count as a plant? I have kept cuttings in the refrigerator for weeks and they root almost as fresh.

Another way is that you find someone who wants to test your plants, a neighbor, family, and would be other 6 + 6, do not know if the laws in your area allow you to make partnerships without profit, or get some type of research license ..
And as a joke ... you could plant 4 in each pot xD
Other way is tissue culture, but take time and resources.

Thank you everyone, you've shared some wonderful ideas for the community and I greatly appreciate it.

Yes, though there are measures which can help mitigate the issue, plant number restrictions and breeding are a horrible combination for us. We need people with resources to push these poorly written laws and get them changed.