cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
The red cloud of joyI'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.
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Making AgNO3
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The finished product. 12g from 8g of silver. A small piece of the coin left over.
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Happy chuckin'!
I can smell it
(Duvall voice)