More seed info for other newbees like me (I'm lucky old timers haven't laughed at me about all this):
JUST BUY SEEDS FROM REPUTABLE DEALERS!!!
That's my best advice. We need those guys to preserve precious strains over the decades. When you make seeds at home, you're likely to end up with a lot of half-breeds. It's hard to keep multiple plants with pollen, a safe distance apart.
But if you're interested in learning to make seeds, and don't mind getting weaker pot from the seed plants (and losing the pollen plants), and having some of them be untested new hybrids, here's what I've Iearned so far.
If you made some pollen, use it when a separate plant only has the top 1/4th of the white hairs on its buds. When its just starting out making the buds. Then you don't get too many seeds, but you'll still get plenty.
Why not get too many seeds? Less trichomes on the buds. If it's fully covered in seeds, it's going to be weak pot (but apparently still usable). If it's only got 1/4th of what it could, it seems to have plenty of trichomes. Even stickier than with no seeds, it seems to me.
But there is a drawback even if you don't over seed. The pot has to sit a LONG time to mature the seeds. It's going to be well into amber trichome territory. Sleepy weed in other words.
Of course as Vostok (I had a girlfriend from Vladivostok) pointed out, you can harvest smokeable buds before the seeds are done. That seems like an advantage for brushing the pollen on by hand.
When you pollinate buds, you can tell after 2 days which little white hairs accepted the pollen. They start to crinkle up at the top and turn darker. Do a second pollination if needed, but I advise not waiting too long. It's inconvenient for the seeds to mature at different times, on the same bud. Sure, you could wait till all of them mature. But if you're playing around, you're likely to search out buds with brown seeds, and pick those first. And if you pollinated too far apart, you'll have half green seeds.
Green seeds have a terrible sprouting rate. I tested it. One in 20 is my guess, depending on whether they're also well formed.
Of brown seeds, regardless of size, every one I tested sprouted. However, they didn't sprout as fast as the ones I bought from reputable dealers. Mine took up to 7 days for some.
I don't know about saving up pollen in a baggy. I had bad lucky trying to "paint" pollen on with a brush. I even tried adding dry rice flower to get more bulk to work with.
It's too much work, and it's not as easy to get it to take as you'd think. If you do that, be sure to blow on the brush when you're done, in the general direction of the buds. I got more seeds from a brush by blowing than by painting. And it didn't have a significant amount I could see, before I blew.
But the best luck I had was planting 2 Super Skunk plants 1 month apart. 2 months would be fine also, they keep making pollen for a very long time.
I sprayed the first Super Skunk with silver. By the time the second plant had buds, all I had to do was shake the first over it, in a trash can. I estimate 600 BIG seeds on that Super Skunk! I just harvested 60 from a single bud today and got NO green ones, because of the single episode of pollination.
I had so much pollen from the first Super Skunk, I decided to make a hybrid on another plant. That second plant, a White Widow, likely has 1000 seeds. It's really hard to estimate, but my guess keeps going up. The harvested pot is weak though.
No one needs 1000 seeds on a single plant. Better to get less seeds, more pot.
