Here is a great article by Pistils over at breedbay!
Breeding Basics
A common sense look at Cannabis Breeding
by Pistils.
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When we partake in the act of breeding, whether it be animal or plant species we take on the role of a parent or guardian, treat your plants as if they were your children because i am sure you wouldn't let your child breed with a mutant hermaphrodite just because they are good looking, would you?
There are 2 common types of Cannabis: Sativa and Indica.
(for the purpose of this quick guide we will look at them in very generalist terms.)
Sativa
Sativa plants usually deliver an 'up' high type, good for thinking, happiness, creativity etc but are usually very tall, tree type cannabis plants and are very hard to control the size due to the extra long bloom time of possibly 12-20 weeks, longer in some cases, so wouldn't be very desirable to indoor cultivation in small, height restricted grow rooms but are suited to outdoor long term growing.
Indica
Indica plants are the more desirable types for the indoor gardener, skunk, Afghan, kush, which have a much shorter bloom cycle and a very different type of effect with more sedating, relaxing and at times debilitating even confusing type of high are much shorter and bushier types and much more desirable in structure for indoor cultivation.
Hybrids
If you were to cross an Indica with a Sativa you create an F1 hybrid of the 2 strains, which traits will be dominant only time will tell by way of growing out as many of the resulting F1 Seeds to determine which parents traits have stayed dominant, you will probably notice slight differences between the resulting F1 plants, some may be taller which would indicate they are dominant in structure at least and lean towards the Sativa parent and visa versa, each type of variation is called a phenotype.
F1, F2 etc
Now, if you cross a F1 female with a F1 male you create F2 seeds and F2 x F2 = F3 and so on, the further away from the F1's you go the more phenotypes you unlock eventually you will have a group of short Indica types and another group of tall Sativa types unless you selectively cross desirable traits type plants with other desirable trait types to produce a new hybrid, I suggest you select possible new P1 candidates from the F3 generation and test these for true breeding potential, ie cross to a non related stable F1 to judge phenotype expression, when your seedlings look very similar and produce flowers that all appear to be the same, ie all resulting plants all possess high potency, are all short , finish flowering in 8 weeks and look pretty similar you most likely have a true breeding P1 female to work with.
However this is all generalist info and totally dependant on the genetics you are working with, for instance it has been known of Indica and Sativa plants to be bred together and produce all Indica type plants in structure but possess a Sativa type high, this would indicate that your Indica parent is dominant in structure and may be useful to improve the structure of large Sativas or the opposite could be true.
there is no way to know until you start breeding but you will only truly know the real genetic make-up of each cross if you have the luxury of space and time to start as many seeds as possible to ensure you have chosen the best candidates to further breed together. A basic rule of thumb is,
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if the resulting hybrids aren't better than the parents used, reject them select better P1 parents to work
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If you select one of your females to use as breeding stock it is referred to as your P1 stock, your parent stock plant. Always keep backup P1 mother plants (or father plants) in case you unknowingly discover problems with any plants you breed them with down the line, you can at least go back to the beginning.
It's All About Males.
The hardest part of breeding is you don't know how good a female is until its finished blooming , dried and you can sample the effect to judge it, compare it to the effect of its parents, if you are trying to improve a muddy high of your best yielding Indica because you don't like its sedating effect but love the taste, smells and appearance, you can't tell until you sample it, so, while you are waiting for the day you can sample, you must preserve clones of it and it's parents to further work the line if the high is desirable.. This is the same with males, you do not know what the male brings to the party until you have harvested the resulting seeds, germinated them, grown them, bloomed, harvested , dried and sampled.. has he added any complexity to your favourite female, has he diluted the traits you desired?
yes you can tell if your structure goals have been met while you are growing and blooming but if you are predominantly breeding for medicinal effect, which in my opinion should always be your main goal, its a very long road, but once you are familiar with how your male combines, you have done a lot of the hard work.. 1 in 20 males is worth using from my experience so using just about any male available is somewhat of a game of Russian roulette...
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Remember phenotype expression is 50% genetics and 50% environment which is another reason we are trying to encourage proper testing as you can create a lovely stable, easy to grow, short ideal strain for your environment but when you trade, gift or sell them to someone with different growing methods, different climate etc your beautiful structured plant can be turn into a very undesirable hermaphrodite mess so proper thorough testing is a must for any breeder.
Polyhybrids...
Most of the strains, hybrids available from new breeders are what are referred to as poly hybrids, its strain A x B = (AB) then an(AB) clone is traded with a friend who has C x D (CD) Hybrid and pollinates CD with his EF which = CxDxExF and so on... eventually one of these clones comes out nice and gets well known and passed from club to club, each time being renamed to help with marketability ( you know it goes on) so before long you have californian AxBxCxD crossed with Texas AxBxCxD resulting in AxBxLxOxOxDxYxMxExSxS, with each component within each cross having hundreds of possible phenotype expressions.. Even if one of these clones is pollinated with a true breeding male, you'd be lucky to get a ratio of 1 :48 being 1 plant in every 48 plants actually displaying the desirable traits of the male.. yes some of the other plants might be lovely but only as clones, polyhybrids are like a rubix cube and once messed up its not too easy to fix especially when marketability comes into it and creates a heap of parental confusion. just to mud up the task a but more...
Don't Believe The Hype
Due to their being dispensaries legally allowed to sell clones has not done the cannabis genome any favours simply down to the fact that each dispensary is trying to compete for business and the only way they can do so is by renaming a strain with their own unique name to create the illusion they have something unique and desirable, something elite that their competition doesn't have.
The only way we will get past this mess is by proper analysis of each strain/hybrids to determine its family line and getting back to reality, the law stands in the way of this industry because I cannot legally use a gas chromatography machine to properly analyse each candidate plant to ascertain its combining ability and to perfectly match traits, terpenes and check without the long guesswork involved in breeding for effect which has a huge amount of variables such as environmental influence such as: ambient heat, airflow, root zone temperatures, EC, PH and body chemistry.
Buying clones is fine if they are only used to produce medical weed crops but when they get used for breeding, most are simply too impatient and in a hurry to cash in on the latest kush craze and simply pollinate for money reasons, releasing the resulting seeds as fast as they are created leaving the customer to discover the possible recessive time bomb and possible hermaphrodite tendencies due to not properly stress testing prior to breeding.
Female Seeds
In my humble opinion the most rewarding direction any hobby breeder can take is to go down the feminizing route to seeds, simply due to the fact that introducing an unknown entity ( male pollen) to your favourite female will inevitably lead to a long long selection process which could be ruined by recessive recombinations, i.e. 2 perfect strains that both carry high resin and taste, smell etc. crossed together can result in exactly the opposite if they both contain a recessive ( non dominant) allele of a trait or traits that are undesirable resulting in them combining to become dominant and the desirable traits becoming recessive, (non dominant). Instead when reversing your favourite female plant to create pollen, this pollen combines perfectly ( in most cases) with females of the same strain which can lead to very stable and desirable plants.
Stress Testing
A lot of people are put off by feminized seeds due to a lot of female seeds are created from unstable plants, it's pretty simple to determine is a plant is a true female or not, ( basically does not display maleness under stress) but can only be reversed by chemical reversing agents which does not pass any instability to the seeds.
If you are trying to determine the stability of any given strain, simply place it under irregular lighting regime, change feed strengths each feed, feed with cold nutrients and trim the bottom branches heavily all within 1 week, but changing the light cycle daily for 7 days will definitely reveal any instability within the strain, if you can't get your female to display any hermaphrodite male flowers, it's a good candidate to reverse with a chemical reversal agent.
Selection Criteria
The most important aspect of cannabis breeding is proper selection criteria, selective breeding is how we improve a species, be it, dogs, cats, birds, fish or cannabis. Without careful selection processes we can actually dilute a potent strain, removing valuable traits by way of hybridizing with unknown genetics which could be dominant for traits that do not add to the medicinal qualities of a strain, but instead replace the desirable dominant traits with undesirable traits such as fibrous stems, low resin, low odour, low potency etc.
Cannabis Breeding is not a game and is not at all obvious , predictable, quick or easy, if you like fast results I suggest you learn about Selfing using chemical reversal agents such as STS (Silver Thiosulphate) to force a known stable, desirable female to produce pollen which can then be used to pollinate a non STS treated clone of the same female, resulting in a much higher chance of creating plants (all be it female plants) that should be dominant for the traits that you were attracted to in the first place. Even this procedure shouldn't be taken lightly as you will need to use stable genetics and not poly hybrids. If you have plenty of time, patience, space and an unsatisfiable desire to learn and improve, you are at the beginning of a really rewarding journey.
It seriously depresses me to see a plethora of kush strains available and none are any better than the original kush lines, simply renamed phenotypes of those original genetics and most created from hermaphrodite pollinations which could take a few generations to reveal itself as an undesirable recessive trait that will ruin years of careful breeding just by starting a breeding project with a so called 'Elite Clone' as a P1 breeding tool. In a nutshell, serious breeding takes a lot of space, time, dedication, thought, instinct, skill but most important is a true love for the plant and a realization that we are it's guardians and should only breed to improve the plant not our bank balances.
