A lifelong passion for cannabis has led Sasha (better known as Joint Doctor) to a mission: to spread autoflowers to every corner of the world, and to provide growers with open-source genetics so they can breed their own seeds. Sasha is known for launching the Age of Autoflowers: he released the first autoflowering strain, Lowryder, exactly 20 years ago. Today, most autoflowering strains can be traced back to Lowryder and its unique traits.
Sasha is still going strong, and through Doctor’s Choice ™, continues his mission, by helping growers create their own autoflowering strains. There are just a few steps for a grower to become a breeder, with a little patience and dedication
One of the ways to create your own autoflowering strain involves crossing your favourite regular female plant from a non-autoflowering strain or landrace, with a male from a pure autoflowering strain such as Lowryder, or any other strain from our special «Be a Breeder» collection.
Note!
- It’s very important to make sure your autoflowering regular male is producing pollen at the same time as your female regular plant is flowering. Or you can just store male pollen and use it when your female is ready.
- Always choose the most vigorous regular male plant with the most flowers.
- Pollinate your female with the Lowryder regular male pollen. Important: it takes approximately 4 weeks for your seeds to mature properly.
Step 1 – Create an F1 strain
The first step of any breeding is to create an F1 strain: a first-generation hybrid of two plants. This quite simply involves pollinating one variety with the pollen from another. It’s the simplest and most direct way to breed a different and somewhat customized version of a strain that you already like. The two strains that you breed together are known as the “parent” plants, and the better your selection of parent plants, the better the result. The F1 generation tends to be a fairly stable combination of both parents, and has what is referred to as “hybrid vigour.”
Once your F1 seeds are ready and properly dried, plant as many as you can.
Note!
- First-generation of seeds is called F1 (hybrid), it’s not yet autoflowering, as this is a recessive trait.
- F1s will behave like the parents’ plants, and are quite similar to each other, displaying what we call “hybrid vigour”, often being more similar to the mother strain than to the father one.
- When flowering, select the best male regular plant from the F1 batch and remove all the rest. Pollinate your best F1 girl(s) to receive F2 seeds.
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Step 2 – selection. Plant as many collected seeds as possible
These F2 generation seeds will give you an average of 25% (or 1 out of every 4) autoflowering plants. Keep only those autoflowering plants, that begin to flower without any reduction of light. Indoors, keep your lights on for 18 hours/day from now on – autos don’t need 12 hours to flower. Keep the best autoflowering regular male and use it to pollinate its female regular counterparts.
Step 3 – Receive F3 seeds
If the last step was successful, you should now have 95% to 100% autoflowering regular F3 seeds. Of course, you can already stop here, as you’ve got excellent F3 seeds with the required characteristics. But for the best selection, we highly recommend moving to the last step.
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Step 4 – Create F4
To obtain F4 seeds, it’s desirable to grow out a large number of F3 plants and select the best ones to create a fully autoflowering strain F4 = P1. You’ll receive your own strain with all your desired characteristics – taste, smell, strength, the abundance of resin, plant structure, flowering time, etc. On the base of F4, you can easily create feminized seeds that will grow into incredibly stabilized plants!
It’s important to use the male pollen from the previous generation in order to avoid excessive inbreeding. Just save the male pollen from the previous generation for further breeding and store it properly.
Note!
- Carefully select only mother plants with the desired traits.
- When selecting a regular male plant, choose the father based on its plant structure, height, smell, and abundance of flowers.
You can easily breed your own strain with our original regular strains from our special «Be a Breeder» collection and especially our legendary IBL Lowryder.
Trust your grower’s intuition!
Become a breeder with our regular strains and personalized support! Good luck!
– Sasha the Joint Doctor –