Marijuana seed breeding gives you power few people have: you get to create the buds that get you super high in the way you most like.
By carefully breeding cannabis seeds that produce your favorite types of medical marijuana, you grow out your strains, ingest buds grown from them, keep track of what makes you feel best, and then create seeds that duplicate or improve the marijuana genetics you most love.
For example, let’s say you want marijuana that stimulates you but also gets rid of chronic pain. In the past, you’ve tried a pure Haze that gave you extra energy and lifted your mood…but it did nothing to relieve chronic pain.
You tried Northern Lights or Kush, and found they provided pain relief, but made you too sleepy.
So you get Haze seeds, Kush seeds and Northern Lights seeds, germinate the seeds, select the most desirable males and females, breed your own seeds, and using marijuana breeding techniques, you combine the characteristics of Haze, Kush and Northern Lights.
Here’s the basic process for breeding marijuana seeds:
A) Source premium, reliable genetics that always grow out to be the strains they are advertised to be.
For example, instead of getting cheap Haze, Northern Lights or Kush from a re-seller, try to get the original genetics from marijuana breeders who developed the strains.
In many cases, a marijuana dispensary will have a reliable supply of marijuana seeds in the fundamental strains you want.
Or you could order marijuana seeds online. Read this guide first. Go for high-quality marijuana seed companies like TGA Subcool Seeds.
B) Sprout your marijuana seeds. Monitor seedlings closely to see which ones have the most favorable characteristics, such as thick stalks and fast growth.
C) Flip to 12-hour light cycle when your cannabis plant development is appropriate for it. Within two weeks you’ll see some plants developing male flowers and some developing female flowers.
D) Select the most desirable marijuana males; isolate them in a separate 12-hour grow room so they can’t contaminate your females. Ensure there are no vectors that allow unplanned pollen transfer from your male room to any female plants.
E) Place black poly plastic under your male plants; that makes it easier to look for pollen (yellow powder).
When your male plants are producing pollen, bring a small, dry, sterile, shallow, wide-mouth glass or plastic container into your grow room. Place the container under ripe male flowers and tap the flowers lightly so that the pollen falls into the container. Do this until you have a sufficient amount of fresh pollen.
F) If you’ve planned properly, your female cannabis flowers will be ready to pollinate at the same time your male flowers are ripe.
This is tricky timing to achieve: be aware that male flowers tend to produce pollen slightly ahead of when female flowers first ripen enough to be pollinated.
After you’ve collected pollen, seal the container it’s in and place the container in the top half of a refrigerator.
After being in a pollen room or handling pollen, change clothes and take a shower before you enter your female plants’ grow room (pollen easily travels on clothes, shoes, hair and skin).
G) Choose lower branches on prime female plants for pollination. If necessary, use paper or plastic to temporarily and loosely wrap adjacent branches to prevent inadvertent pollination of the entire plant.
Use a small, new, clean artist’s paintbrush (size numbers 3-5) to dip into the pollen. Lightly apply pollen to all bud surfaces, as deep as you can go into the bud without damaging it.
Label your branches or plant pots with identifying language such as: “Haze crossed with Northern Lights”
H) Keep grow room air movement to a minimum for at least three hours after pollination, and avoid using aeration fans that move your plant canopy for at least one day.
Before removing protective coverings from adjacent unpollinated branches, very lightly move the pollinated branches to shake off excess pollen and to further embed pollen into your flowers.
Then remove protective coverings being careful not to distribute stray pollen as you do so.
I) Take a shower and put on new clothes after any work with pollen before you go back into a female plants’ grow room.
If your pollination session has been successful, you’ll soon see cannabis seeds swelling up in your buds and those seeds will be ripe 4-8 weeks from pollination, depending on the strain you’re breeding.
J) It’s best to let your buds develop all the way to harvest and then remove the seeds after you’ve harvested. Remove any leaf or other green covering material from your seeds.
Let them dry for a few days in a dark, aerated, clean place with 75F temperature and low humidity. Store them in a sealed, clean glass jar in the top half of your refrigerator.
Here are fundamental tips to provide you a good foundation for breeding medical marijuana seeds:
A) Let females grow all the way to harvest and test the dried and cured medical marijuana, and then rejuvenate the females, so you make sure you’re pollinating the best females.
B) If you want to breed a medical marijuana variety with itself, don’t buy feminized seeds: you won’t get any males (no pollen). Using regular unfeminized seeds, ratios of female to male is usually about 60-40 in favor of females.
C) Turn off all aeration fans and venting fans before you work with pollen.
D) Using pollen from one strain to fertilize a different strain helps you combine favorable characteristics from two different strains.
E) Pollen is perishable. Use it within four days of collecting it.
F) If you become expert at seed breeding, consider it as a new profession. Highly-ranked seeds cost as much as $250-300 for ten.
G) Properly-bred, harvested and stored seeds remain viable 1-5 years after harvest under optimum conditions.
Marijuana seed breeding is simple to do if all you want is to cross a favorite male with a favorite female. But there are advanced techniques you can read about in a fantastic book called “Marijuana Botany,” and in other seed breeding articles here at BigBudsMag.com.
These allow you to “back-cross” so you uncover hidden layers of genetics as you’re breeding your marijuana seeds. You’ll find popular varieties of Haze that have been bred using Thai Sativa, Northern Lights and Skunk, and using advanced techniques you find sweet genetics hidden underneath the hybrid.
In fact, one thing you find out when breeding marijuana seeds: breeding hybrid marijuana strains often doesn’t give you an exact copy of the plants you started with!
Marijuana seed breeding is an art and a science, and it’s well worth trying and mastering.
