getting a stable strain

Alright guys trying to get this breeding thing down. I have my seeds, but I want to get seeds off the plants I grow. If I can somehow get seeds from my parent plant, I grow out all the seeds from my parent plant, and find the best males and females with the genes im looking for, and then cross them? Which I would then end up with F2, then get seeds from the F2 and find the best male and female once again with the genes im looking for, and cross them to get F3. And some where around F4 they should be closer to stable? Producing seeds that grow the same plants.

Anyone? Or do I keep the male pollen from the first male I choose and keep crossing the good females with that same male pollen?

I think to lock down traits, you have to grow out the F2 progeny. Then backcross it with the mother of the strain you want to lock down traits from. Theres a bunch of good books that go into detail about breeding. I'm just learning myself.

Let's see if I can kind of explain what I understand about this. Ok you have your seeds and grow out your first plants, you find your assortment of male and females, select your best male and female with the traits that you want. The seeds you make from this batch are the F1s. Your are going to have basically 4 phenos possible in this batch of seeds. Your grow out these seeds and select your best male and females, now to stabilize or start to stablize what you already have you backcross these F1s with plants from your original seeds. You are now starting to narrow your gene base, you can have 64 pheno's from this generation, sounds crazy but this is how it works. This generation will offer much diversity of gene combinations, ok now you take the plants that have what you are looking for and cross back to your F1 plants. The seeds you obtain from this can now be backcross to the original seeds which reinforces the dominate traits......it can be much more complicated than this but this is a short explaination on how it works. I am enclosing a couple of links for you to read which will explain in much more detail than I can.
I make my own seeds and have my gene pool in place for the "strains or crosses" I plan to use to do this exact same thing. That being said unless you can grow out a large amount of seeds to examine you will probably have limited success in a true stable strain. You can have lots of fun make some great plants and narrow your gene expressions down fairly easily though.
In order to cut the time down to do this let me tell you how I have started. I take my seeds from a strain and grow them out, take clones from any plants that look promising for what I am looking for. I allow the plant to grow out naturally, no topping, fimming, etc so that I can see how the plant grows and structured. Then when the girls are in flower I start the next generation of seeds, grow these out taking clones of promising plants. Now I can make my F1s, have the next generation ready to pollinate, and still have my original parents ready for the backcrossing. Once I have selected the choicest plants of the first two generations growing side by side I can see what progress I have made with the main plants I have selected. Then with the F2s I like to grow out a few look for any promising traits which appear that might lend itself to be bred back with the F1s to keep a good gene pool to promote plant vigor and finding that better flower or better male.
I hope that what I wrote makes sense to you and offers a little insight. The biggest thing you need to do is to keep detailed records of what you have done. Making a photo record of your different phenos will be a great help once you start to see all the different phenos which will appear as you progress.

This link is from another site but explains well.
http://www.breedbay.co.uk/forums/breeders-library/201338388-breeders-choice-breeding-male-selection.html

This link is very informative and I still read and reread it regularly when I am making my selections for the future.
http://www.mellowgold.com/grow/mjbotany-removed/marijuanabotany3.html

Good Luck

if your after more what the mom and dad was then stay at F1. more out in the f you go the more resessive genes come out and look nothing lijke the original partents. and to do this right to go out to f4 will take years...or should if done right. and to make stable you ened to keep them parents from previous F series to backcross to....sorry...more to make an IBL. and that is stable, or should be

how can anyone know how many phenos there will be unless they run it out. impossible

heres more on breeding and Mendels Law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_inheritance

Looks like ill grow out my seeds, find the best male, and the best female, and pollinate the fuck out of her, then ill have loads of F1 seeds to grow out over the years. Thanks guys.

keep records od good and bad traits that each plant exibits

mushroom head said:

Anyone? Or do I keep the male pollen from the first male I choose and keep crossing the good females with that same male pollen?

Click to expand...

The First progeny of two parents should exemplify 100% of the dominant traits if they are a true-breeding varieties, wherever the genes come from. If you then cross all of the F1 progeny, their offspring (F2) should exemplify 75% dominant characteristics and 25% recessive. 25% of the 75% being a full expression of the dominant genotype and 50% of the 75% being plants with mixed traits, also resulting in a dominant. You can then use inbreeding, backcrossing and what-have-you to really break down a build a nice plant or variety.

When I started, I found the breeding section in Jorge Cervante's bible to be quite helpful.

~ooli~

Thanks for the help, its just all so confusing. Ill just grow out my strains next year, cross them, and get fuck loads of seeds to grow for the years to come. Then when im settled into a house, ill grow these seeds out and find the best of them, then just clone them to keep the strain going.

Keeping a variety of genetics is a healthy practice. You can, even on a small scale, build a pheno-set--or better yet several--while you're growing.

~ooli~

What do you mean by build a pheno-set? Sorry I dont under stand, thanks.

Sorry for the abbreviation. A set of phenotypes that breed relatively true.

~ooli~

And how do I go about making a pheno-set? Cross my two strains, get F1 seeds. Then grow out the F1's to see what phenos I get, and cross 2 phenos that are close to the same, and that would be one pheno-set?

Im reading something now, and it says that umm say I wanted to get a northern lights plant that produced NL offspring, and NL offspring only. I would take all of my seeds, and grow them out looking for the phenos I want. Cross lots of males with my desired females, and figure out which males contributed the desired genes. Then grow out more seeds, and choose the male that contributed the genes I wanted, and I would know which male it is because I recorded the pheno type, then cross this male with my northernlights female.

Am I making any sense?

IDK if what I am doing is correct or not, I have been doing lots of reading on breeding, genetics and the like the past few months both for the ladies and just plant breeding in general. The best way I have figured it is to select the strain you are looking for, say NL I then go into my seed search engine, http://en.seedfinder.eu/index.php?SUCHE=SEEDS&GO=JA and I look up what made NL and there are lots of varieties from different breeders. So if you look at this chart given for seedsman's NL you find that if is from NL clone in 1985 and was crossed with Haze to form their version of NL (IBL).
So now you have your seeds lets say from seedsman you grow out several seeds say a 10 pack and for the sake of ease you come up with two phenos out of this since it is a F1 cross and normally you are only going to receive 4 phenos from an F1, but this line is already been bred back to itself over many years.
Ok so now you have two phenos and have both male and females of the same phenos. You pick the pair you want to breed to each other. When you cross these 2 say Pheno #1 with Pheno #1 and obtain the seeds from this cross, you have a new F1 with your Pheno #1 as your dominate traits. If you then cross these back with each other you will show many more phenos with this generation. Now if you back cross with your original batch of seeds, meaning that you have a clone from the original seeds from seedsman you are starting to stablize what your crossed.
This is a simple explaination with lots of drawbacks doing this on a small scale but also with the possible reward of having something unique and adapted in future generations to your own growing conditions. The major drawback is to breed to closely in your gene pool and lose the hybrid vigor you obtain with the crosses. I can't say that I have ever made a strain which I could breed true but I have been able to produce a majority of like plants with the vigor of new hybrids. I am still trying, still learning and still making seeds. I think the most important factor in doing this is record keeping and lots of notes and photos.
Presently I am starting a new program with seeds from Sannie's. I bought several strains which have common strains throughout and now trying to figure out which I want to try and set up for ILB and look for a promising F1 in the future.
Did this make any sense? Sorry if it didn't I still sit here with my breeding charts from the different strains and figure out what came from whom but sure am having fun doing it.
Best of Luck and Happy Growing