POLLINATING ONE LOWER BRANCH (HELP)

I have separated my males from females.. I kept one of the males in a window in hopes of collecting pollen to create my own seeds. I only want to do a lower branch or two but im new to this breeding thing so I'd like help so i dont ruin my harvest..

One of my girls is about 2 or 3 weeks into flower with mini "buds" and tons of pistils my other is an aurora indica. She's pretty small but i may pollinate a branch on her as well. Why not? Its really nice to see these new phenotypes and u really never know, u may breed pure gold one day
. Anyways my first question would be, "can i get pollen from this male yet?" .. if so, how do i do it? How do i ensure the pollination of ONLY the branches i want? And when is it too late to pollinate the girls?

And the leaves only look that because i almost let it dry up and then changed my mind at the last minute.. those are the spots that started to dry up.. just didnt want people thinking the genetics weren't a good choice

i put a sheet of plastic under the plant, and watch for the sacs to start to burst. you can collect it directly from the flowers with a jar and a small brush. the plastic sheet catches what you miss. i put a small container of dessicant beads in the jar with the pollen, and store it in a cool , dry, dark place.
seeds take a good 6 weeks most of the time to be mature, so you have to plan ahead and try to pollinate within a week or so of buds starting to form, so you have enough time for them to get done.
those look like they're getting pretty close, matter of a few days, i'd say

This is how I did it.
Others have other methods, worked for me.
Pluck off, collect some pollen sacks when they start to open.
(I'm not pollinating a whole plant.)
Select, tag bud to pollinate. (lower branch or one off to the side)
Turn off fan, fans etc.( leave off for a couple days. You don't want pollen flying all over)
Use a tiny, small paint brush to apply pollen to bud Pistils.
( Don't need to go crazy with the pollen)
Wait a couple days or so. Then mist bud with water.
(Water suppose to kill off live pollen - that is still out for debate.)
Turn fan back on.
That be it.

I don't use this method anymore.

I prefer to just take clones, flower them early keeping them small, pollinate.
Harvest 50 to 100 good seeds for personal grow. More than enough seed stock for me.

Good luck, in making your seeds.
Soon you will be learning how to make Fem seeds

When applying the pollen, if you really don't want any seeds on other parts of the plant, cover the dusted limb with a bread bag, then mist the rest of the plant with water. {water kills pollen}

But a word of warning. Chunks are addictive. Soon you will be sitting on 20-30 crosses you have made.

Indoor breeding has certain restrains outdoor guys don't have. {also has lots of advantages} With all your females so close together, you only want to work with one male at a time. Nothing worse than one seed saying to the seed laying beside it on the rolling tray, "so, who's your daddy?"

That male will be dropping pollen in a few days. You need to get something under it to collect the pollen. I just bend the top over a bowl and let it do it's thing. Take a small paintbrush and paint the pollen on the sites you want to pollinate. It's a good idea to cover the rest of the plant to avoid stray pollen.

I just supercropped the top of this male so it would rest above the bowl.

Heres my girls.. i think we're cutting it close with the bigger one , which is the one i wanted to pollinate.
Genetics : UNKNOWN
(frome here down)
Genetics : AURORA INDICA
This plant is a week or two behind the one above

you want to have at least 6 weeks of flower time left, 8 would be better, to make sure the seeds have time to mature

I just finished collecting pollen from a male BlueBerry plant and he's already revegging in the veg room. I let him get some nice flowers going then chopped off all the tops about 8" long. Put those in a short jar of water so they draped over a sheet of tin foil under a couple of 2700K 9w LED bulbs. CFLs work good too but got to keep up with the times ya know.

Then I dump that into the 180micron screen you see in the pic to filter out bits of flowers etc. Put the pollen in an open vial in a jar with colour changing desiccant called Drierite that's used in labs you see in the second pic to dry it out for a few days.




When I want to pollinate a karger plant I'll put a garbage bag over it and cut a slit to pull out one lower branch and pollinate the buds on it then put a twist tie on it. I've used four different pollens on one plant that way. One branch each day using a fresh bag and keeping the plant out of the flowering room if there are other plants in there I don't want to get any. Spray it down good with water then put it back with the rest.

All the plants in my grow room will be getting a small branch or two dusted with this pollen so I'll just turn off the fans and using a roughed-up Q-Tip carefully dust a few buds on a lower branch of each plant putting a twist tie on those branches. Different coloured ties if different pollens and notes to keep track. Once done I'll spray some water around on the floor and exposed surfaces, leave the fans and lights off until the next day then spray some water on the plants to inactivate any stray pollen before lighting up the room and turning fans back on.

I've been doing this for almost 20 years now and have quite a collection of various strains tho none of the fancy named ones so popular today. Getting into CBD more and will be sprouting many to cross with an Otto#1 female I have in an attempt to make decent CBD versions of them. The Otto is supposed to be up to 27% CBD and less than 1% THC. Already have a couple different crosses of her. Great stuff.

I'll see your test tube and raise you a vial.



Playing around with closeups I got this nice shot of a Kali Mist male 8 years ago.

OldMedUser said:

I'll see your test tube and raise you a vial.

View attachment 4135651

Playing around with closeups I got this nice shot of a Kali Mist male 8 years ago.

View attachment 4135652

Click to expand...

Beautiful. I'll raise you a pollinated sativa.

xtsho said:

Beautiful. I'll raise you a pollinated sativa.

Click to expand...

Thought we were playing pollen poker here. Tossing a wild card in isn't fair.

Roger A. Shrubber said:

you want to have at least 6 weeks of flower time left, 8 would be better, to make sure the seeds have time to mature

Click to expand...

That's why I like doing lower branches so you can crop the rest of the plant and leave that branch until the seeds are ripe. You could probably still pollinate at 8 weeks as long as their were still fresh pistils to take it.

I bend the laws of nature to my will!

OldMedUser said:

That's why I like doing lower branches so you can crop the rest of the plant and leave that branch until the seeds are ripe. You could probably still pollinate at 8 weeks as long as their were still fresh pistils to take it.

I bend the laws of nature to my will!

Click to expand...

This is a game changer! I hadn't thought about it that way but i suppose you could cut all but the pollinated branches to let the seeds fully mature. It would be a helluva shock tho

Grow Harder said:

This is a game changer! I hadn't thought about it that way but i suppose you could cut all but the pollinated branches to let the seeds fully mature. It would be a helluva shock tho

Click to expand...

what's it gonna do? hermie?

Roger A. Shrubber said:

what's it gonna do? hermie?

Click to expand...

U make a valid point

If you want larger flowers for consumption and possibly more seeds let the flowers get 4-5 weeks into bloom (assumes a 10 week flower period) you will want at minimum ime 4weeks from days of dust to have some viable seeds, pale seeds can be viable but tiger stripes and dark shells are what we want. The first calyx to take to pollen can even die if you let the plants go, so seeds should look hard n dark and the surrounding calyx even going brown but frosted and can appear "loose" around beans.

Like this .....

Budzbuddha said:

Like this .....

View attachment 4136043

Click to expand...

That works when you want lots of seeds.