Alaska Hemp

When I get a new pack of seeds that I can’t wait to grow what is the first thing I do?  I germinate all of them…yes…not 2 or 5 or 8 I germinate all 10…by week 3-4 it will be down to one or 2 females if I’m looking for only females…if I wanna make seeds to save for later I’ll keep a male or two also. Why do you ask would I wanna crack all 10 ?  well its a lottery…in that 10 pack there could be one gem if you are lucky, you could find that plant that was in the picture that drew you to that particular strain in the first place or you could not find it, you could find a bunch of average joe plants. But if you only crack a few you lessen your chances of finding a true gem, by gem I mean the plant you will clone and keep in your garden and show off to your friends on average the “gem” is about one in one hundred seeds so about 10 -10 packs.

Now back to germinating…those first 2 weeks are gonna tell you a lot about your new strain, is it vigorous?  Is it healthy? Is it stretching or is it staying short and squat? These are the key characteristics in initial selecting. What are the breeders characteristic notes on that particular strain? The plant they are selling you is short, tall, slow or fast…now take the information the breeder has given you and apply that to your new seedlings.. for example you bought an Afghani Indica x Thai….in the pictures you see a medium plant with large colas indicating it has taken characteristics from both parents. Look at the leaf sets how many blades, are they skinny leaves are they fat leaves? Apply that to your new seedlings. Now you notice your seedlings have 3 different leaf patterns.  That is showing you the traits from parents and also traits form the hybrid. The skinny leaves will be the Thai dominant the fat bladed leaves will of course be Afghani and the in between will be your hybrid. Now you can see the difference in the gene pool in growth an outward appearance. Now to find out the inside…when the plant gets to about the 4th or 5th leaf sets its time to do a stem rub…the smell…you are looking for that smell that strain is known for. In this particular demonstration you are looking for an Afghani dominant plant since you plan on growing it indoors you want to keep it shorter and more compact so you will smell and look for that earthy citrusy smell Afghani is known for.

Out of 10 seeds say you got 2 with skinny leaves, 4 with medium leaves and 4 with fat leaves. If you want now you can kill off the others if you don’t have space or room to grow them out or you can grow em out and see. But for our story here you wanted the Afgani dominant line of this strain the same as pictured on the seed distributors webpage you bought them from. So you kill off 6, keep 4 and grow them till you reach sex then sex them, keeping your females. Once you grow out the few females with the proper genetics you are looking for you can choose between those for your best clone mom. But this way you can save a lot of dirt and time selecting the pant you are actually going for.  This can be applied every time you buy and grow seeds. You look for that cookie plant in the blueberry GSC cross, you know the cookies stretches and longer internodes so you can select that way, it saves me from growing out undesirables and saving on dirt and nutrients and since I’m breeding anyway I need an effective way to cull the herd.  So when I grow out an OG seed I know its the OG dom when I get to the stem rub, other strains it can be the stretch or shortness tighter internode spacing even before stem rub. So internode spacing , leaf sets or blades and stem rub. There you go 3 ways to tell if you got the strain you bought and how to find the desired phenotype. Some of the best strains today were found in a handful of beans, imagine if there was 100 of those beans…those elite clones might not even be the “gem” in the bunch had they been able to be selected from a larger gene pool.

Anddes420 can be found at http://www.ca2akgenetics.com/

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