Home Breeding Basics for Beginners

Mt Zion Seed Cooperative is excited to explain some of the basics of how to get started with breeding your own strain, with specific examples from the incredible stock found on Garden Supply Plug. We are happy to incentivize home breeding with these incredible genetics sourced by Garden Supply Plug and we hope this helps you get a jump start in creating your own strains.

When breeding, you first identify your desired traits. You can breed for the stability of traits, or for great variety, for a specific medical trait, terpene, or for yield alone. The list goes on and on. Breeding can get complicated, but there is no better school than experience, so go forward fearlessly and experiment.

After deciding your parent strains, based upon your goals and anticipated cross, it becomes as simple as selecting your mother and father plant or plants. If you choose to do open pollination, even within only two lines, you will preserve much more diversity. If you choose to cull all but one male and one female, you will narrow the traits expressed in the seeds. You can also have one mother with multiple fathers, which preserves the matrilineal line in more consistency but gives variety from multiple fathers.

Oaksterdam x GTFO #5 by Mt Zion Seed Coop

For example, I would like to take my prized cultivar, Zion Train, and cross it with the Peaches regular seeds Garden Supply Plug offers from Greenhand Genetics. I would personally choose that cross because of the peach terpenes I would like to add to the sweet lemon-lime of the zion train, and because the peaches has an interesting father to me, the llama sanglug. I also love the bud structure in the picture and would love to see the difference in phenotype that would come from the foxtail side of the family.

Personally, I would start 10 seeds of each, keep the best 5 males and females of each strain, and let them all cross. Then I would hunt the children for the next generation. When making F2, it’s usually to try to start to lock down traits you want to stabilize. That’s where the long-term labor of love comes in.

Growing males isn’t too different than female cannabis plants, but you will notice most males finish before the females, and start earlier. I usually cut my boys down two weeks before the girls, depending on the strain of course. Be sure to take care with mold and curing, if you do, even a seed run can yield some great product to make hash, etc. I personally still smoke joints from seeded ganja, years on. Pick the seeds out, enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Anyone who has read this far gets 20% off Oaksterdam Kush x 2021 open
pollination seeds when you use the code icanread! Happy breeding!

Peaches F2 by Greenhands
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