The working board for people who make seed rather than buy it: choosing parents, running a cross, selecting through generations, producing feminized seed with silver thiosulfate, and the drift and degradation that show up in a line two generations later.
Breeding is mostly selection, and selection is mostly record keeping. A cross is one afternoon; deciding which of the resulting plants deserves to become a parent takes a full run, honest notes and the willingness to discard almost everything. The threads here are about that discipline as much as about technique.
Two things are worth settling before starting. Feminized seed is made by reversing a female plant chemically and pollinating with it, which means the result carries the genetics of two females and cannot be used to test for hermaphroditism the way a regular male can; both approaches have a place and they are not substitutes. And a first-generation cross between two stable parents is usually uniform, while the second generation is where the variation appears, which is the generation most home breeders never grow out.
Where to start
- Cannabis Genetics Decoded: Breeder Vocabulary on Seed Labels
- Making Feminized Seeds: Silver Thiosulfate and Colloidal Silver
- Phenotype Hunting: From a Packet of Seeds to One Keeper Mother
- Cannabis Plant Sex: Male, Female, Hermaphrodite and DNA Testing
- Cannabis Strain Degradation: Causes, Consequences and Solutions