Pollination, what do I need to know?

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
This will be my first time collecting pollen, first time pollenating plants and collecting seed from said plants.

Does anyone do this?
I've been pollen chucking for about 20 years now and there's lots of ways to skin this cat.

Easiest is to put a male in with the girls, supply good air circulation and let nature take it's course. That will get you a shit-ton of seeds but the yield and potency of the bud will suffer greatly.

I cut a few bendy branches off a male plant and put them in a jar of water so they droop over and drop their pollen and dead flowers on a sheet of tin foil. All you need is a small flowering light like a 23W - 2700K CFL or something similar on a timer for 12/12. Can set it up in a cardboard box in a closet somewhere far away from your plants. I use a 180micron screen that I also use for making dry sift to run the pollen through into the collection pan. That cleans out all the tiny bits of flower that are moist and you don't want moisture in your pollen. Then I scoop it up into a vial and put the open vial into a sealed jar with some colour changing drying crystals called Drierite for a few days then seal up the vial and store it in that jar. Starts blue then goes pink when it's absorbed all the moisture it can. Then you bake it in a toaster oven or regular oven at about 450F for a half hour to dry it out and turn it blue again. Can do the same with white rice that's been heated for a while to dry it out more too.

Then I just take the female I want to make seeds with at about 3 weeks flower. Take it out of the grow room, put a garbage bag over all but the one branch I want to pollinate and use a Q-Tip or tiny paint brush to dust the buds on that branch. I leave it in the shop overnight then spray everything including that branch down with water to deactivate and loose pollen and believe me there will be lots of loose pollen you can't even see. Spray the bag good, the pot it's in, all over the branch and the floor all around the pot.

If you want you can do the same thing to another branch with different pollen to get another strain off the same plant. I had 5 on one big girl once. Different coloured twist ties or some other method of identifying which branch got which pollen and write it all down where you can find it too! Right now I have a fem auto hi-CBD girl with 2 small lower branches done with different pollen. One is from 2 males of the same strain and the other is from an auto fem that came up male of a hi-THC strain. can see seeds cracking the calyxes now.

When the plant is ripe and ready for harvest you just go ahead and chop all but the branches with seeds ripening if they aren't done yet. You'll see them splitting the calyxes and some could even fall out on their own. Then you can just take each branch off one at a time and trim the buds up a bit and put them in paper bags to dry out for a week or so then take them out and crumble to get the seeds. Don't forget to mark the bags with the crosses info too so they don't get mixed up.

This year I'm getting into making my own fem seeds using Silver ThioSulfate aka STS. Made my own silver nitrate with a .9999 8g silver coin and about 20ml of boiling concentrated nitric acid. Wear your PPE for this one and do it ouside as it produces a cloud of bright orange fumes that will fry your eyes, sinus' and lungs. Good old NOx that turns into nitric acid when it finds moisture like inside of you. lol I bought the sodium thiosulfate from a chem supply back east in Ontario. $22 for 500g and $69 for Purolator to get it to me as it goes as dangerous goods and Canada Post won't deliver such.

That's about it. Now I'm going to save a copy of this for the next grower that asks the same question and save a lot of thinking and typing. Not so easy when you're hitting the Hindu Kush pretty hard on a Friday night. LOL

That's my sift screen on the bottom right. A BlueBerry male donating his dust.

BBmalePollen10051802.jpg

Making AgNO3

AgNO303.jpg

The finished product. 12g from 8g of silver. A small piece of the coin left over.

AgNO305.jpg

Happy chuckin'!

:peace:
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
I've been pollen chucking for about 20 years now and there's lots of ways to skin this cat.

Easiest is to put a male in with the girls, supply good air circulation and let nature take it's course. That will get you a shit-ton of seeds but the yield and potency of the bud will suffer greatly.

I cut a few bendy branches off a male plant and put them in a jar of water so they droop over and drop their pollen and dead flowers on a sheet of tin foil. All you need is a small flowering light like a 23W - 2700K CFL or something similar on a timer for 12/12. Can set it up in a cardboard box in a closet somewhere far away from your plants. I use a 180micron screen that I also use for making dry sift to run the pollen through into the collection pan. That cleans out all the tiny bits of flower that are moist and you don't want moisture in your pollen. Then I scoop it up into a vial and put the open vial into a sealed jar with some colour changing drying crystals called Drierite for a few days then seal up the vial and store it in that jar. Starts blue then goes pink when it's absorbed all the moisture it can. Then you bake it in a toaster oven or regular oven at about 450F for a half hour to dry it out and turn it blue again. Can do the same with white rice that's been heated for a while to dry it out more too.

Then I just take the female I want to make seeds with at about 3 weeks flower. Take it out of the grow room, put a garbage bag over all but the one branch I want to pollinate and use a Q-Tip or tiny paint brush to dust the buds on that branch. I leave it in the shop overnight then spray everything including that branch down with water to deactivate and loose pollen and believe me there will be lots of loose pollen you can't even see. Spray the bag good, the pot it's in, all over the branch and the floor all around the pot.

If you want you can do the same thing to another branch with different pollen to get another strain off the same plant. I had 5 on one big girl once. Different coloured twist ties or some other method of identifying which branch got which pollen and write it all down where you can find it too! Right now I have a fem auto hi-CBD girl with 2 small lower branches done with different pollen. One is from 2 males of the same strain and the other is from an auto fem that came up male of a hi-THC strain. can see seeds cracking the calyxes now.

When the plant is ripe and ready for harvest you just go ahead and chop all but the branches with seeds ripening if they aren't done yet. You'll see them splitting the calyxes and some could even fall out on their own. Then you can just take each branch off one at a time and trim the buds up a bit and put them in paper bags to dry out for a week or so then take them out and crumble to get the seeds. Don't forget to mark the bags with the crosses info too so they don't get mixed up.

This year I'm getting into making my own fem seeds using Silver ThioSulfate aka STS. Made my own silver nitrate with a .9999 8g silver coin and about 20ml of boiling concentrated nitric acid. Wear your PPE for this one and do it ouside as it produces a cloud of bright orange fumes that will fry your eyes, sinus' and lungs. Good old NOx that turns into nitric acid when it finds moisture like inside of you. lol I bought the sodium thiosulfate from a chem supply back east in Ontario. $22 for 500g and $69 for Purolator to get it to me as it goes as dangerous goods and Canada Post won't deliver such.

That's about it. Now I'm going to save a copy of this for the next grower that asks the same question and save a lot of thinking and typing. Not so easy when you're hitting the Hindu Kush pretty hard on a Friday night. LOL

That's my sift screen on the bottom right. A BlueBerry male donating his dust.

View attachment 4660972

Making AgNO3

View attachment 4660973

The finished product. 12g from 8g of silver. A small piece of the coin left over.

View attachment 4660974

Happy chuckin'!

:peace:
@OldMedUser you are a delightful read over coffee. Thank you very much.
 

Rob Roy

Well-Known Member
I like to pollinate a lower branch and mark it with a colored bread wrapper type twist tie. That way within a few days you can easily see if the pistils have browned and withered and the pollen has knocked her up.

One branch or even one bud can make lots of seeds and you still get unseeded bud from the rest of the plant if you carefully pollinate away from air turbulence. Also if your plant is ready to harvest but the seeds aren't quite finished, you can harvest the top part of the plant and leave a bit of vegetation and the seeded branch in flower to finish forming seeds.

I record the date of pollination and the who banged who info as well as any morphological notes or structure, leaf pattern, smells, finish times, nice ass or rack etc. in a log book. I also like to differentiate between sister plants that are pollinated. I segregate and store the seeds from sister plants separately, for instance, "Girl Scout Cookies #1 x Durban Poison male, Girl Scout Cookies #2 x Durban Poison male etc.

Sometimes, if you have a really frisky fecund female you can get her to take multiple males pollen and create a few different crosses from the same plant. In my notations of seed crosses I consistently list the female first for consistent record keeping. Ladies before gentlemen.

1598112077950.png
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
I like to pollinate a lower branch and mark it with a colored bread wrapper type twist tie. That way within a few days you can easily see if the pistils have browned and withered and the pollen has knocked her up.

One branch or even one bud can make lots of seeds and you still get unseeded bud from the rest of the plant if you carefully pollinate away from air turbulence. Also if your plant is ready to harvest but the seeds aren't quite finished, you can harvest the top part of the plant and leave a bit of vegetation and the seeded branch in flower to finish forming seeds.

I record the date of pollination and the who banged who info as well as any morphological notes or structure, leaf pattern, smells, finish times, nice ass or rack etc. in a log book. I also like to differentiate between sister plants that are pollinated. I segregate and store the seeds from sister plants separately, for instance, "Girl Scout Cookies #1 x Durban Poison male, Girl Scout Cookies #2 x Durban Poison male etc.

Sometimes, if you have a really frisky fecund female you can get her to take multiple males pollen and create a few different crosses from the same plant. In my notations of seed crosses I consistently list the female first for consistent record keeping. Ladies before gentlemen.

View attachment 4661114
Do you happen to know if male genetic morphological traits can be inherited?

My suspected boy(not a man yet) is a very hardy beneficial mutant and my known lady is a temperamental queen.
 

Boatguy

Well-Known Member
I've been pollen chucking for about 20 years now and there's lots of ways to skin this cat.

Easiest is to put a male in with the girls, supply good air circulation and let nature take it's course. That will get you a shit-ton of seeds but the yield and potency of the bud will suffer greatly.

I cut a few bendy branches off a male plant and put them in a jar of water so they droop over and drop their pollen and dead flowers on a sheet of tin foil. All you need is a small flowering light like a 23W - 2700K CFL or something similar on a timer for 12/12. Can set it up in a cardboard box in a closet somewhere far away from your plants. I use a 180micron screen that I also use for making dry sift to run the pollen through into the collection pan. That cleans out all the tiny bits of flower that are moist and you don't want moisture in your pollen. Then I scoop it up into a vial and put the open vial into a sealed jar with some colour changing drying crystals called Drierite for a few days then seal up the vial and store it in that jar. Starts blue then goes pink when it's absorbed all the moisture it can. Then you bake it in a toaster oven or regular oven at about 450F for a half hour to dry it out and turn it blue again. Can do the same with white rice that's been heated for a while to dry it out more too.

Then I just take the female I want to make seeds with at about 3 weeks flower. Take it out of the grow room, put a garbage bag over all but the one branch I want to pollinate and use a Q-Tip or tiny paint brush to dust the buds on that branch. I leave it in the shop overnight then spray everything including that branch down with water to deactivate and loose pollen and believe me there will be lots of loose pollen you can't even see. Spray the bag good, the pot it's in, all over the branch and the floor all around the pot.

If you want you can do the same thing to another branch with different pollen to get another strain off the same plant. I had 5 on one big girl once. Different coloured twist ties or some other method of identifying which branch got which pollen and write it all down where you can find it too! Right now I have a fem auto hi-CBD girl with 2 small lower branches done with different pollen. One is from 2 males of the same strain and the other is from an auto fem that came up male of a hi-THC strain. can see seeds cracking the calyxes now.

When the plant is ripe and ready for harvest you just go ahead and chop all but the branches with seeds ripening if they aren't done yet. You'll see them splitting the calyxes and some could even fall out on their own. Then you can just take each branch off one at a time and trim the buds up a bit and put them in paper bags to dry out for a week or so then take them out and crumble to get the seeds. Don't forget to mark the bags with the crosses info too so they don't get mixed up.

This year I'm getting into making my own fem seeds using Silver ThioSulfate aka STS. Made my own silver nitrate with a .9999 8g silver coin and about 20ml of boiling concentrated nitric acid. Wear your PPE for this one and do it ouside as it produces a cloud of bright orange fumes that will fry your eyes, sinus' and lungs. Good old NOx that turns into nitric acid when it finds moisture like inside of you. lol I bought the sodium thiosulfate from a chem supply back east in Ontario. $22 for 500g and $69 for Purolator to get it to me as it goes as dangerous goods and Canada Post won't deliver such.

That's about it. Now I'm going to save a copy of this for the next grower that asks the same question and save a lot of thinking and typing. Not so easy when you're hitting the Hindu Kush pretty hard on a Friday night. LOL

That's my sift screen on the bottom right. A BlueBerry male donating his dust.

View attachment 4660972

Making AgNO3

View attachment 4660973

The finished product. 12g from 8g of silver. A small piece of the coin left over.

View attachment 4660974

Happy chuckin'!

:peace:
I just collected some pollen the same way a month or so ago.
IMG_0210.jpeg
 

Rob Roy

Well-Known Member
Do you happen to know if male genetic morphological traits can be inherited?

My suspected boy(not a man yet) is a very hardy beneficial mutant and my known lady is a temperamental queen.
I assume they can. I'm under the impression a stud male can enhance the traits of the offspring more than a run of the mill male pot plant. Most people don't have the space or energy to maintain a large male plant population to select through, but those who do and are good at picking males seem to be able to produce nice crosses or influence the offspring in the direction they are hoping to. So male selection matters, but if all you got is one male, don't let that stop you from slinging pollen.

Males can be used to add structural integrity like stronger branches etc. Males can increase or decrease other traits too, like mold resistance, thc, CBD or terpene contents, plant size, finish times etc. I'm more of an intuitive gardener and don't know the X's and Y's inheritability thing as good as I probably should. Maybe somebody else will be able to give a more scientific explanation to your question and my answer regarding the male role in breeding.

I have slung a good bit of pollen and have impressed and disappointed myself with some of the results. To paraphrase Luther Burbank, keep pollinating the good ones and toss the crappy ones. Good luck with your efforts.

1598116937151.png
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
I assume they can. I'm under the impression a stud male can enhance the traits of the offspring more than a run of the mill male pot plant. Most people don't have the space or energy to maintain a large male plant population to select through, but those who do and are good at picking males seem to be able to produce nice crosses or influence the offspring in the direction they are hoping to. So male selection matters, but if all you got is one male, don't let that stop you from slinging pollen.

Males can be used to add structural integrity like stronger branches etc. Males can increase or decrease other traits too, like mold resistance, thc, CBD or terpene contents, plant size, finish times etc. I'm more of an intuitive gardener and don't know the X's and Y's inheritability thing as good as I probably should. Maybe somebody else will be able to give a more scientific explanation to your question and my answer regarding the male role in breeding.

I have slung a good bit of pollen and have impressed and disappointed myself with some of the results. To paraphrase Luther Burbank, keep pollinating the good ones and toss the crappy ones. Good luck with your efforts.

View attachment 4661148
My suspected male is a trifoliate beast that resists heat, insects and drought. Hopefully some if not all of those traits pass along.
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
Do you happen to know if male genetic morphological traits can be inherited?

My suspected boy(not a man yet) is a very hardy beneficial mutant and my known lady is a temperamental queen.
For sure. One of the ways I make selection of male or female plants is to rub the main stem then smell your fingers to see what kind of odors/terpenes you can expect in the bud. If it's something you like you want to find a mate with the same odor to hopefully get more of those from the union. It can take many generations to stabilize a strain along with back-crossing

You also want to judge the plant's growth patterns, node spacing and all sorts of other things when you have a few to pick from. I'm no expert at that so just use my best judgment to try and get what I'm after. The biggest doesn't always mean the best either and sometimes it's the weirdos that have something that would fit perfectly into your plans for a nice strain you can work on to come up with something uniquely your own.

After seeding if the girl goes hemie you can either toss the seeds or grow out more to breed out the hermie trait. It all takes time and a lot of work which many established breeders have worked on for ages only to have their genetics stolen by other guys wanting to sell good seeds and even big corporations like the main legal pot growers here in Canada who just bought what they liked off the web like us and renamed the strains tho at first some used the original names. No credit or monies paid to the breeder either.

#1 tip. Always get cuttings off new plants before you flower them just in case they turn out to be something really good. Even the most stable strains will have deviants in the mix that may just have the perfect set of genes that really sets it apart.

When you see seeds being sold that are marked F1or even F2 but sold for the same money as reliable stable strains that could be F8s it's a bloody rip-off. Anyone can make those by just crossing two different strains and what I've been doing for ages. Got a couple goodies tho. Kali Mist x Northern Lights #5 both from the old Marc Emery's Seed Bank around the year 2000. Another cross by a guy I've lost touch with who lived in Texas is his Lone Star Blue Heaven which is L.S.D. x DJ Short's blueberry. Both from Barney's Farms about 2008 when they still sold regular seeds mostly. Neither of those ever showed hermie tendencies and both yield lots of frosty goodness.

This is the Blue Heaven at about 4 weeks.

BlueHeaven01.jpg

Can't seem to find any pics of the other one. I need to grow some more of those out and make some fresh seeds as it's been a few years. I'll make some fem seeds as well as regulars too.

:peace:
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
For sure. One of the ways I make selection of male or female plants is to rub the main stem then smell your fingers to see what kind of odors/terpenes you can expect in the bud. If it's something you like you want to find a mate with the same odor to hopefully get more of those from the union. It can take many generations to stabilize a strain along with back-crossing

You also want to judge the plant's growth patterns, node spacing and all sorts of other things when you have a few to pick from. I'm no expert at that so just use my best judgment to try and get what I'm after. The biggest doesn't always mean the best either and sometimes it's the weirdos that have something that would fit perfectly into your plans for a nice strain you can work on to come up with something uniquely your own.

After seeding if the girl goes hemie you can either toss the seeds or grow out more to breed out the hermie trait. It all takes time and a lot of work which many established breeders have worked on for ages only to have their genetics stolen by other guys wanting to sell good seeds and even big corporations like the main legal pot growers here in Canada who just bought what they liked off the web like us and renamed the strains tho at first some used the original names. No credit or monies paid to the breeder either.

#1 tip. Always get cuttings off new plants before you flower them just in case they turn out to be something really good. Even the most stable strains will have deviants in the mix that may just have the perfect set of genes that really sets it apart.

When you see seeds being sold that are marked F1or even F2 but sold for the same money as reliable stable strains that could be F8s it's a bloody rip-off. Anyone can make those by just crossing two different strains and what I've been doing for ages. Got a couple goodies tho. Kali Mist x Northern Lights #5 both from the old Marc Emery's Seed Bank around the year 2000. Another cross by a guy I've lost touch with who lived in Texas is his Lone Star Blue Heaven which is L.S.D. x DJ Short's blueberry. Both from Barney's Farms about 2008 when they still sold regular seeds mostly. Neither of those ever showed hermie tendencies and both yield lots of frosty goodness.

This is the Blue Heaven at about 4 weeks.

View attachment 4661913

Can't seem to find any pics of the other one. I need to grow some more of those out and make some fresh seeds as it's been a few years. I'll make some fem seeds as well as regulars too.

:peace:
I love Blue strains. The blue/greys that come out during flower make my Grinch heart swell three sizes.

I'm riding Blue Mystic and Kaya Gold right now. I have too many plants. I'm legal with 4 plants but 4 in my little tent should really have been 1 in that tent.

I do have a few goals with learning how to chuck. I'm fucking tired of paying $60 or more for 10 seeds.
They're seeds to happiness but seeds none the less and I don't ever want to pay for them again.

I love Blue Mystic and I love Kaya Gold. They're strains that make me feel. If I start with making BM F2's and KG F2's (I have to assume I'm working from scratch), I can also make some Kayan Blue Golden Mystics F1s. (Am I using the F-terms right)

I work with photo seeds so the genetics are hopefully more stable.
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
(Am I using the F-terms right)

I work with photo seeds so the genetics are hopefully more stable.
I'm not great with all the different labels they use when breeding plants. The Fs are easy enough I think. The first seeds you make from a cross are F1 then when you select breeding pairs to grow from the seeds you get the next batch of seeds are F2 and so on. I've only just read over more advanced parts of plant breeding so there are different designations when you back-cross and inbreed which I think are the same things.

An older but good thread here about this stuff.

Photos are no more stable than autos really. It all depends on who did the breeding and with what genetics. Most of the strains coming out now are such mixed up mongrels that odd genes express themselves many generations down the line sometimes. Some people try to breed to go back to one of the parents or great grand parents of a cross but that's kinda like trying to breed poodles back to their wolf ancestor I think. lol

When you've been growing for a couple of decades it can get to be more of a chore than a labour of love sometimes. Getting into breeding properly and making fem seeds will keep me interested hopefully tho with limited space and resources I can't really do it as well as dedicated breeders of days past who might grow out hundreds of plants to find the few stars of their programs. I try to do 10 of ones I'm interested in but count 5 as a minimum.

:peace:
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
I'm not great with all the different labels they use when breeding plants. The Fs are easy enough I think. The first seeds you make from a cross are F1 then when you select breeding pairs to grow from the seeds you get the next batch of seeds are F2 and so on. I've only just read over more advanced parts of plant breeding so there are different designations when you back-cross and inbreed which I think are the same things.

An older but good thread here about this stuff.

Photos are no more stable than autos really. It all depends on who did the breeding and with what genetics. Most of the strains coming out now are such mixed up mongrels that odd genes express themselves many generations down the line sometimes. Some people try to breed to go back to one of the parents or great grand parents of a cross but that's kinda like trying to breed poodles back to their wolf ancestor I think. lol

When you've been growing for a couple of decades it can get to be more of a chore than a labour of love sometimes. Getting into breeding properly and making fem seeds will keep me interested hopefully tho with limited space and resources I can't really do it as well as dedicated breeders of days past who might grow out hundreds of plants to find the few stars of their programs. I try to do 10 of ones I'm interested in but count 5 as a minimum.

:peace:
I use old genetics, Nirvanas Blue Mystic and Nirvana Kaya Gold. I have a few newer genetics still in seed like Zkittles but my prize seed right now is an OG Kush. I'll never plant it because I wasn't impressed by it when I smoked OG Kush but I like having it.

If I grow out the two Blue Mystics I have and breed them, the result would be F2s? If I grow out those seeds and breed them, they would be F3s?

Ideally, I want a permanent seed stock of photoperiod Blue Mystic. I sorta want a supply of Kaya Gold too but Blue Mystic is my all time favorite and I've been smoking different kinds of ganj for 27 years. Blue Mystic has been the only smoke that set my soul on fire.

I appreciate all of you folks giving me some tips. The help in this thread will be a great place for me to start learning the end phase of propagation.
 

CannaOnerStar

Well-Known Member
I've been pollen chucking for about 20 years now and there's lots of ways to skin this cat.

Easiest is to put a male in with the girls, supply good air circulation and let nature take it's course. That will get you a shit-ton of seeds but the yield and potency of the bud will suffer greatly.

I cut a few bendy branches off a male plant and put them in a jar of water so they droop over and drop their pollen and dead flowers on a sheet of tin foil. All you need is a small flowering light like a 23W - 2700K CFL or something similar on a timer for 12/12. Can set it up in a cardboard box in a closet somewhere far away from your plants. I use a 180micron screen that I also use for making dry sift to run the pollen through into the collection pan. That cleans out all the tiny bits of flower that are moist and you don't want moisture in your pollen. Then I scoop it up into a vial and put the open vial into a sealed jar with some colour changing drying crystals called Drierite for a few days then seal up the vial and store it in that jar. Starts blue then goes pink when it's absorbed all the moisture it can. Then you bake it in a toaster oven or regular oven at about 450F for a half hour to dry it out and turn it blue again. Can do the same with white rice that's been heated for a while to dry it out more too.

Then I just take the female I want to make seeds with at about 3 weeks flower. Take it out of the grow room, put a garbage bag over all but the one branch I want to pollinate and use a Q-Tip or tiny paint brush to dust the buds on that branch. I leave it in the shop overnight then spray everything including that branch down with water to deactivate and loose pollen and believe me there will be lots of loose pollen you can't even see. Spray the bag good, the pot it's in, all over the branch and the floor all around the pot.

If you want you can do the same thing to another branch with different pollen to get another strain off the same plant. I had 5 on one big girl once. Different coloured twist ties or some other method of identifying which branch got which pollen and write it all down where you can find it too! Right now I have a fem auto hi-CBD girl with 2 small lower branches done with different pollen. One is from 2 males of the same strain and the other is from an auto fem that came up male of a hi-THC strain. can see seeds cracking the calyxes now.

When the plant is ripe and ready for harvest you just go ahead and chop all but the branches with seeds ripening if they aren't done yet. You'll see them splitting the calyxes and some could even fall out on their own. Then you can just take each branch off one at a time and trim the buds up a bit and put them in paper bags to dry out for a week or so then take them out and crumble to get the seeds. Don't forget to mark the bags with the crosses info too so they don't get mixed up.

This year I'm getting into making my own fem seeds using Silver ThioSulfate aka STS. Made my own silver nitrate with a .9999 8g silver coin and about 20ml of boiling concentrated nitric acid. Wear your PPE for this one and do it ouside as it produces a cloud of bright orange fumes that will fry your eyes, sinus' and lungs. Good old NOx that turns into nitric acid when it finds moisture like inside of you. lol I bought the sodium thiosulfate from a chem supply back east in Ontario. $22 for 500g and $69 for Purolator to get it to me as it goes as dangerous goods and Canada Post won't deliver such.

That's about it. Now I'm going to save a copy of this for the next grower that asks the same question and save a lot of thinking and typing. Not so easy when you're hitting the Hindu Kush pretty hard on a Friday night. LOL

That's my sift screen on the bottom right. A BlueBerry male donating his dust.

View attachment 4660972

Making AgNO3

View attachment 4660973

The finished product. 12g from 8g of silver. A small piece of the coin left over.

View attachment 4660974

Happy chuckin'!

:peace:
If you cut the male stems like that. Do they keep developing even after cut, or do you need to cut them when they are almost ready to open? Also do you pick out the first flowers until there more that are ready to open? Im always afraid if i dont more the males out soon enough, they might open during night and pollinate stuff.. Then i end up moving them under a low watt light and they continue developing slooooow and do not end up opening for a while. How do you exactly approach this? I usually just move the males under low light after im afraid to have them in same tent with females and then wait till it produces some under it, but this might seem like an easier option if i can make sure that i dont accidentally have sacks open during night.
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
If I grow out the two Blue Mystics I have and breed them, the result would be F2s? If I grow out those seeds and breed them, they would be F3s?
The first seeds from a cross are F1s then when you get more seeds from breeding those of the same batch they are f2s. The original parents are F0 I believe.

:peace:
 

Kalebaiden

Well-Known Member
If you cut the male stems like that. Do they keep developing even after cut, or do you need to cut them when they are almost ready to open? Also do you pick out the first flowers until there more that are ready to open? Im always afraid if i dont more the males out soon enough, they might open during night and pollinate stuff.. Then i end up moving them under a low watt light and they continue developing slooooow and do not end up opening for a while. How do you exactly approach this? I usually just move the males under low light after im afraid to have them in same tent with females and then wait till it produces some under it, but this might seem like an easier option if i can make sure that i dont accidentally have sacks open during night.
Not that I know a damn thing yet but I did start reading the old propagator post OMU linked and it says to make sure you keep providing the 12/12 light or the plant will stop pollen production within a few days.

OMU would know better than me because I'm a propagation nublet.
 

OldMedUser

Well-Known Member
If you cut the male stems like that. Do they keep developing even after cut, or do you need to cut them when they are almost ready to open? Also do you pick out the first flowers until there more that are ready to open? Im always afraid if i dont more the males out soon enough, they might open during night and pollinate stuff.. Then i end up moving them under a low watt light and they continue developing slooooow and do not end up opening for a while. How do you exactly approach this? I usually just move the males under low light after im afraid to have them in same tent with females and then wait till it produces some under it, but this might seem like an easier option if i can make sure that i dont accidentally have sacks open during night.
The flowers will mature then open up and drop pollen on to the foil so I let it go until I figure I have sufficient pollen then screen to clean it and put it in the vials. Sometimes the ends in the water crust over so I just slice off a bit to keep them able to draw up water. I use a mix of tap and RO water for then so sit in.

Some of the flowers on those are just starting to split but none have dropped pollen yet but would in a day or two more so I just chopped down the male yesterday and saved those branches for the pollen. They are in the spare bedroom with no other plants around and no fans going.

BigFiskars.JPG

Trying to pick off ripe sacs to keep a male around flowering girls is a losing game so once they start swelling and usually changing colour to light green/yellow they are ready to bust a nut and got to go. I've used one or two 23W CFLs to let them finish like thse ones and it works fine. They don't need a lot of light or any nutes as they can't use nutes without roots.

:peace:
 
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