Pheno Hunting Strategy

[Limeygreen]

If you keep them happy in half gallon pots it should be ok, just make sure everything goes right and be prepared to run the best twice to make sure.

The beds are a good idea, just make sure you plant everything at once in flower bed as you can run into problems with shadowing and crowding with an uneven crop otherwise. If they are very sativa dominate, try flowering them in 4 inch pots for 3-5 weeks depending how stretchy they get to reduce overall size then transplant into final bed or container, I've seen plants go at 2 inches end up over 35 inches from flowering where root restriction should have helped instead but lesson learned.

 

[MJPassion]

You can run half what you want & choose your favorite 2-4 plants from it to run again with the other half of your seeds making final decisions about which to keep at the end.

Culling plants after flowering them for 3-4 weeks is just as apt to loose your true gems.

In order to find exactly what you are looking for is advisable to finish ALL females.

Taking short cuts will yield mediocre results.

 

[bigbadbiddy]

Hey Nathalia,

there are many ways to do this and definitely no "right" way.

When I started out, I was looking to do it the same way as you. I reasoned the smaller pots you take, the more phenos you can look through.

But to me, it was hard to reliably pheno hunt with such tiny plants. They all looked underdeveloped and I found this method to be inconclusive. I furthermore decided that I want to run "sorta" no-till organic soil and decided that to do so, no less than 5 gallon pots will do.

So I ended up flowering the max number I can in 5 gallon pots for my pheno hunting. Thats 24 I believe.
With 1 gallon pots, I could have flowered 100 or more I believe each round. But such plant numbers also bring a lot of risk with them so that was another reason to scale it down a bit.

The way I currently pheno hunt is as follows:
1) Grow plants from seed, when they are large enough to top, I top them first time and take the tops as clones.
2) Once seedplants are mature and clones have rooted, I transplant seedplants to flower and rooted clones into veg pots.
3) I flower out the seedplants and make my notes. The clones in veg are topped and LSTed more in the meantime. I don't mess with the original seedplants aside from topping them once for clones to get a somewhat good idea how they grow naturally. In the past I just took the clones from the bottom but I have come to realize that the 1 topping provides me with a) better clones (100% success in jiffy plugs so far when using tops) and b) immensely increase yield
4) When the seedplants are harvested, I take another set of clones from the clones in veg and as soon as they rooted, I transplant the original clones into flower.
5) I now pop the next round of seeds, dry and cure the seedplants.
6) When the original seedplant clones are about a month into flower, my harvested seedplants have dried/cured for a month and are ready for testing.
7) I now have 1 month to test the seedplants while watching the seedplant clones flower and see how the phenos perform as clones as well.
8) When the seedplant clones are harvested, I transplant the new strain (the seeds I pooped in 5) ) into flower.
9) At this point I made my selection and cull everything but the 1 or 2 females I want to keep as mothers.


I feel that running the plants a second time from clone is not necessary to pheno hunt but helpful as you see how they perform as clones which can have quite the difference compared to how they perform as seedplants.
This method also has another benefit:
When pheno hunting, you pop more seeds than you can flower, usually. So you often end up with more females than you have room to flower. In this scenario, you can simply throw in the seedplants that couldn't be flowered due to space in the first round and remove some of the weakest looking clones from the first round to make room.
This way you never throw out a female without giving it the chance to perform as well. Also, the original seedplant clone still exists, you just don't run it a second time from clone.
So in case the seedplant turns out to be stellar after all, you can still keep it.


The only issue I have with my system (aside from it not being really streamlined and taking a lot of time/keeping you busy with the same strain for 2 cycles instead of 1) is the selection of males.

Basically, when the seedplants reach maturity and I identify the females for flower, I round up all the males, do a stem rub, look at them long and hard and then listen to my gut feeling and just keep one of them.

But I feel this is too rudimentary, there must be a better way to select...

Either way, the purpose is to keep a male alive in order to conserve the strain by making F2 seeds.

I haven't decided yet if I should do a third run of the same strain in which I use my smaller flower chamber to make F2 seeds or if I just keep the male alive and do a seed run once I selected males from 1-3 strains.

The male I selected looked great structurally and everything, seems late flowering and all and had some good smells here and there. But when I killed off the remaining males, I noticed some much stronger odors from some of them (I have come to realize that sometimes you get the strongest smell from plants when you take them out of their pots and massage the rootball).

Anyway, the whole male selection remains a doozy but for female selection, if you have the time and no pressure, I like my system.

 

[Limeygreen]

One thing about the beds, I tried doing sexing in there but the problem becomes the holes left then uneven canopy if you want to put more in, leaf removal, branch pruning doesn't help much with every variety to allow light in, for this I put new seedlings for the next round into the flower room in small pots to sex them. If males don't want to be kept they will be culled when sexed, females moved back to veg then clones taken when ready to flower, any clones that are difficult to root are culled (3 weeks is given most root in 6-12 days). None the less I've a jungle but I love it once selections are made the notes will be your best friend of where and when to plant to maintain a good canopy if you're running multiple varieties in the same bed.

I put seed plants in as well but remove all but one shoot, don't allow much branching, top 3 nodes branching seems to be sufficient, 5 is great but crowding is quite extensive, still workable and a fun type of jungle but at 4 per square foot branching isn't needed.

 

[bigbadbiddy]

I really like my method for sexing purposes as well.

The first time I ran my method, I was worrying about how I am going to separate males and females.

The original plan was to take 2 clones from the first topping and have one as a backup while I put the other in a solo cup and flower it to sex.

But in the end I could completely skip this step as the seedplants were already so mature that I could very clearly identify males and females from their preflowers.
So I never needed to flower anything. The seedplants were mature enough it was very obvious which ones were male and female.

There were a hand full I wasn't 100% sure but they were all male.
It might be depending on the strain but in my experience, the females are 100% easily identified because their pre-flowers are very obvious and clear. The males are a bit tricky to spot.
But one could always throw them in the flower tent in solo cups still, if they weren't sure.

I had 70% females last run so the remaining 30% I didn't bother to test if they were truly male. Was quite a safe assumption and they would have been the only females that weren't clearly showing their sex by that point.

 

[growhigh1233]

im a ride or die MF..................... i dont 12/12 from seedling, i wait until maybe the 4th node,then flower them all out,,toss males if i dont need pollen,if i do need pollen, separate males flower/reveg

and look for females with desirable traits for reveg , some traits show late , or you just get a feeling about a plant . way the resin looks or has right structure nice n short

flavour and scent are my fav traits to look for this way !!........... 20 or 30 females profiles to analyse test n get lost in

chimera s1 sweet skunk is my fav scent of the moment ............. insanely strong lemon citrus ........ only 1 in 10 had that profile tho rest were so so

 

[bigbadbiddy]

What I don't like about reveging is that they are in the large flowering pots and each one takes up so much space in the veg chamber...
And they take so long to reveg.
I prefer cloning ahead of time. Reveging is a tool if necessary to me. But there seem to be better options imho.

 

[MJPassion]

What I don't like about reveging is that they are in the large flowering pots and each one takes up so much space in the veg chamber...
And they take so long to reveg.
I prefer cloning ahead of time. Reveging is a tool if necessary to me. But there seem to be better options imho.

Do some root pruning when ya re-veg & put the plants back in smaller containers.

It's not as if a few leaves need a huge root mass.

 

[bigbadbiddy]

Do some root pruning when ya re-veg & put the plants back in smaller containers.

It's not as if a few leaves need a huge root mass.

Nice, wasn't aware that helps in cutting reveg time down.
Thanks for the tip!

 

[growhigh1233]

What I don't like about reveging is that they are in the large flowering pots and each one takes up so much space in the veg chamber...
And they take so long to reveg.
I prefer cloning ahead of time. Reveging is a tool if necessary to me. But there seem to be better options imho.

id agree that it is safer and ideal to take cuttings ........ but for me in my situation it wud mean i cudnt start allot of seeds,, because id have to keep the cuttings somewhere, maybe even 2x of each to be safe............. with the reveg system a grower can start as many seeds as like really ...., and then keepers reveg while keeper clones are vegging them selfs anyway..........i usually take seedlings to 50-55 days flower if a 60 day plant... by then, u can see all traits id argue

then fully test the keeper revegs with your keeper clones your next grow

 

[Guy Brush]

Nice, wasn't aware that helps in cutting reveg time down.
Thanks for the tip!

He didn't say that.

 

[Guy Brush]

id agree that it is safer and ideal to take cuttings ........ but for me in my situation it wud mean i cudnt start allot of seeds,, because id have to keep the cuttings somewhere, maybe even 2x of each to be safe............. with the reveg system a grower can start as many seeds as like really ...., and then keepers reveg while keeper clones are vegging them selfs anyway..........i usually take seedlings to 50-55 days flower if a 60 day plant... by then, u can see all traits id argue

then fully test the keeper revegs with your keeper clones your next grow

Reveg is the last option and can go wrong. So better have one or two options beforehand.

 

[growhigh1233]

Reveg is the last option and can go wrong. So better have one or two options beforehand.

yes i agree.... its good practice, just encase that killer pheno decides not to reveg !!!

but me im a seed popper,,,,,a pheno hunter, so my number 1 goal, is number of specimens

taking cuttings wud mean i could plant maybe 70 seeds a year

reveging its 300+ seeds a year, even more if space allowed

and reveging the plants a good 10 days before there finishing time, means i get pretty much 100% reveg success rate

 

[growhigh1233]

and in a weird sorta way .............. it adds a little bit more excitement and intrigue to the grow imo

even know you have found the nice pheno,,,,still have weeks before you know without doubt its going to reveg, checking it daily,looking for any sign of fresh green... analysing the plant,all while your sampling its harvest, hoping she comes back to life so you can grow some more

 

[bigbadbiddy]

He didn't say that.

Whoops, now I get it.
He just meant I can root prune the reveg plant in order to not have it take up real estate in the veg chamber with its big flowering pot.

Got it chief

 

[MJPassion]

Yup.

 

[Smoggy]

& perpetuate pest problems instead of small copies in new medium

 

[Smoggy]

U can keep dozens of different clones for months if need be in cubes/plugs in a small footprint standard dome tray. They're easy to wash too.
Gambling on keeping bugs around, hacking & transplanting Salty stump, & it not reverting - lost a squid-ink purps flowing clone that didn't flip back.