Collecting pollen...Tedious, annoying. Any better methods out there?

So I got some bag seed for my very first grow I only got 3 good plants, 2 females and 1 Wonderful male. The male was the biggest fastest grower out of all the plants and amazingly bushy so I decided that is the one I want for my bitches so I took the other smaller male out.

I left it next to the females to ensure pollination, but I also want to collect pollen for later use because this male was just amazing for the crappy environment I had it in, it was still the biggest and baddest of them all.

What I do is I go in the room once a day bend the top stocks over and tap the branches over a plate then I inspect the whole plant and I hand pluck (one by one) every little sack that is splitting on the bottom and has white stripes obviously appearing all around the pod.

Someone said scatter them let them dry then crush them and sift the pollen out...well I went and got a sifter and it crushes the sacks and everything but the screen just lets all the plant material through along with the pollen... Then I end up with this



I have tried cutting off a branch and letting it sit in a shot glass of water over a plate but I had horrible results with that... because the stem is upright and I need it to be horizontal so all the pollen lands on the plate not the other sacs and leaves.

I tried using my gel packs by poking a hole in the side and hanging it over a plate. I just did that today so I don't know if it is going to work yet.



From 2 days of plucking and shaking this is how much pollen I have gathered



As you can see there is some plant material in there I don't know how to get it out because I have nothing fine enough that will only let pollen through...

Does anyone have any other methods that are easier and more efficient than what i am doing? Also will leaving that small amount of plant material in the pollen hurt anything?

Gather those swollen striped pods that are getting ready to open up, and put them in a baggie. Leave the bag a little open and let it sit in a cool, dark dry place to dry and ripen. In 2-3 days take that bag and tap/shake/agitate it a bit up and you will see the golden powder start to collect in the bottom of the baggie. No crushing required. Pick out any veg matter with a tweezer, and that should do it. This proceedure does it for me everytime.

I let the pollen dry for a couple days then mix it with flour that was heated in an oven 200-300 deg for 15-20 min to dry and sterilize the flour and into a small ziploc and then into a tin with dry rice right into the freezer. It works fine. I just hit one of my girls with 7 month old pollen stored this way and in a few days swollen seed pods appeared all over that bud that was dusted.

just put sheets of paper around the base of your male and collect it directly if you're doing an open pollination. that plastic bag tech works even better if you use paper bags that let the pollen breath as plastic traps humidity. i just lined the base of my C99 x A11 male plant with 3-4 pieces of typing paper and waited until it was late if flowering then just carefully picked each piece up and floded it down the middle to funnel the pollen into little folded and labelled envelopes i made and put them in the freezer. i don't know how viable the pollen is though. that remains to be seen. i like waiting for the stamen to open on their own when they're ready instead of trying to force them.

i think next time around i'm going to make flowering chambers to put under shop lights using strips of wood to make rectangular frames for the males to stretch in and putting paper on the to and bottom to collect the pollen in as well as let light pass through without pollinating everything in my garden. just wrapping branches with paper socks might or might not be easier. i like the frame idea better as you can just cut the male's main stem and take the frame into another room to collect the pollen instead of wrestling with potentially leaky pure paper.

if you just want to keep yourself supplied with seeds, you could just back cross your offspring and then select from the wide pheno expression or even for both males and females that have the most traits of your preferred strain.

Well After a while I felt it wasn't actually that bad to take 30 minutes every day and inspect the male I want for big splitting sacs and pick them off and throw them on a screen the next day I would come in shake the screen a couple time and there would be a pile of pollen under it, then I would inspect again and pick more seeds that matured the next day, after doing this for about 1-2 weeks I got a decent amount of pollen

That's a shitload once you stretch that with some flower you can pollinate for years to come, a little goes a long way; Literally.

regards,

I just set up paper discs under the sacs, and collected after they popped open.

@Jpegg
Yeah dude, that is enough pollen to seed every plant west of the Mississippi.

Man you know what, i just did my first complete seed run. I think that pollen collection is worth less than the time you spend on it. Like you i found a male that had genes worth keeping, it even had some resin on it. So i decided to let nature take its course. I think it was a Jack Herer male if im not mistaken. So i let him pollinate the room completely, in which he got 5 females (White Widow, XJ-13, and some bagseed) pregnant. So im going to have a shit ton of seeds i know.

So here is my logic. I figure that the male i got was probably somewhere in the middle of the gene spectrum, meaning it could have been better, but it could have been worse too. So i figure with enough seeds, you have a 50/50 chance of finding something even better next time. And if not, you know that the gene to make something close to that original father exists somewhere in those 1000 seeds i made.

Would love to hear agreements or disagreements.

jcurtis that is why breeding works. lol. plant a bunch of seeds. pick the best. seed them. repeat until you get the desired results. (that is really simplified)

i just came up with a slight variation on the "paper bag" tech i want to try myself keeping my males in the same room. i plan to MAKE bags that go over my shoots by taping the edges of typing paper together! that should be a much easier shape to manage than paper bags as you'd get more of a flat envelope shape, and you could easily tape the bottom edges to the stems to keep the bags from leaking. then, when you're ready to harvest your pollen, just snip off a shoot, take it out of the room, turn it upside down and shake it vigorously to get as much pollen to the "bottom" as possible, and you already have it in an envelope that should make handling it easy, though you might want to open it outside in case you get some spillage. you could even sift out the flowers with a screen, but you'd want to rinse it out & let it dry before switching strains to prevent contamination. another nice thing about that tech is that you can make the "bags" whatever dimensions you need, but it would seem more manageable to make a bag for each stem than to make a big one that can easily tear covering an entire plant. having the pollen already in an envelope makes pouring it more precise too. as to the jack herer, i think what matters the most would be the quality of the jack you started out with to begin with. the "best" male in a watered down schwag cross probably won't be as good as the worst one bred from two champion grade parents. not only that, but as you're making your own hybrids, you'll get that nice hybrid vigor boost in compensation anyways, and can select for whatever's best in the future. i imagine some control freak will rant on about pollen chucking, but if it's your room, do whatever the eff you want man! not everyone has the space to keep a mother and and flowering room, clones of a bunch of males waiting for test results, or room for 50 gals to select from. the most important thing is just starting with the best genes possible. that's why many love TGA gear. he only uses the best parents, but those same haters like to bitch that he doesn't stabilize each and every strain. i prefer the f1s myself because hybrid vigor is a freebie that you lose trying to bottleneck a strain. i thought my pollen chucked super cali haze x C99 was way better than ANY of my C99 moms and i just used the dominant short male untested. (shorts or TGA suggest selecting non-dom males) it was fruitier with just a bit more psychoactivity. if you have several crosses in the works and started with a decent jack, you ought to get SOMETHING nice, and i'd rather smoke your jack hybrids than any of the indica doms you're starting with any day. you're improving them no matter what anyone says.