breeding program ?

Is it disadvantageous to begin a breeding program with a stable f1 male crossed to f1 females of different genetic backgrounds?
Or does the males genetic makeup need to be backcrossed with his mother until the cubing process is complete, then choose a male from the backcrossed gene pool to mate with other females?
or just weed out the unwanted phenotypes from the f1xf1 gene pool and begin the back crossing with the new f1 mother plants?

when you cross two f1's, you get what is called hybrid vigor, which means the offspring can outgrow the parents in both growth rates and potency, which is always a good thing in my book...
but as i'm sure you know, you're going to end up with lots of pheno's, depending on what parent stock was used and how stable they are..

you could always take the offspring from the f1 x f1 x and back cross them to the parent stock if you're trying to isolate a certain trait in the mom or dad, or do as you said, and cull any plants that don't fit what you're looking for and work with the ones that are left..

F1s are not stable, they are hybrids. An F1 line may appear stable but they don't breed true. Crossing 4 different strains together is going to give you a multitude of possible gene combinations but I think is still going to be considered an F1 and perhaps even express hybrid vigor. Further down the road it will become exponentially harder to achieve any form of stability because of the diverse genepool. You can't look at the breeding as being so black and white that I breed this to that and cube this to that....what you need to do is focus on your goals for the breeding project. Choose only plants that fit your specific criteria and you should be able to produce more of those traits in future offspring. A fourway cross though, where do you start?

thats what i was thinking pipedream, I have a project going on now that yielded an interesting male, and I just received an unbelievable pheno of another variety so I was thinking of diverging my efforts as the phenotypic expression of this cutting is far more important to isolate. Thanks for the replies.
...onward