Question to growers: Why not create your own strains?

I read about a lot of growers on various grow forums in a constant cycle of grow----> buy seeds ----> grow ----> buy more seeds etc....

Is it just easier?

Or is it because folks just want to try something different?

The cost of seeds is pretty shocking, IMO, and it seems that growers would simply continuously clone, or create their own seed for future use, rather than shell out cash for something they can produce themselves.

prices paid per seed average about $4-5 I'd say with shipping included. Thats less than the price of a meal at a fast food place. so really its not as expensive as it seems. think about how much that plant could end up yeilding and it becomes even less noticable. many people who breed do play with making their own strains and will make seeds of strains they grow and such, that is one of the reasons why people like to get their hands on new genetics. another is the fact strains do have different positives and negatives and can vary quite a bit so its popular to try many different ones to find the strains that you like best. its actually kind of addicting after a while as it can be fairly exciting growing strains for the first time and seeing how they turn out and all.

do you know how many times these guys mate strains to get a stable strain. its not just letting your male blow his pollen on your girls. you may wind up with many phenos, is fact, you WILL, wind up with many phenos. there's more to it than it seems.

in fact.......hats of to the botanists/breeders!

scroglodyte said:

do you know how many times these guys mate strains to get a stable strain. its not just letting your male blow his pollen on your girls. you may wind up with many phenos, is fact, you WILL, wind up with many phenos. there's more to it than it seems.

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Honestly, no. Botany/horticulture was never my gig, which is one of the reasons I found this place.

However, I'm learning every day.

Back in the day, weed was more of a vanilla, choc, strawberry world. At least in the area I lived in. Today it's like 31 flavors.

I guess that's a good thing.

I will only buy seeds to add another genetic to what I have, you can always breed again, haveing a multi season goal feels even better than watching your babys grow individually.

scroglodyte said:

do you know how many times these guys mate strains to get a stable strain. its not just letting your male blow his pollen on your girls. you may wind up with many phenos, is fact, you WILL, wind up with many phenos. there's more to it than it seems.

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perhaps the word play was a poor choice of words on my part. what you said is all correct.

A few points:

First of all, lots of people buy seeds, run though a pack or two to find a good "keeper" plant, then clone it to perpetuate it, or to fill up their growrooms. If you do this, and divide the cost of the pack over the dozens or even hundreds of clone plants you eventually generate from it, the per-plant cost is actually pretty low.

In terms of cost, remember you're taking months to do the grow, its taking up hours of your time, you're spending $X on bulbs nutrients and electricity, and you're going to end up with many ounces of herb at the end. Looking at it that way, even if you're paying $60-100 per pack of seeds per crop its not that big of an expense, relatively speaking.

*IF* you happen to be buying seeds of a true-breeding strain (aka an "inbred line") then you could just cross any male and any female to generate your own seeds. This is a viable option for many of the stable "old school" strains that have been around for a while.

Unfortunately, many if not most of the popular strains "of the month" are not stabilized hybrids, so in crossing two plants from a pack of seeds, you'd end up with any number of offspring plants with DIFFERENT characteristics. That's not desirable from a growing standpoint.

And this is really what's at issue here. As mentioned, the "problem" with creating your own strains is that doing so is highly labor intensive. If you want to create something NEW, you literally need to select from dozens if not hundreds of mature plants to identify the characteristics you want. Already that's beyond the capabilities of most small "personal" growers, who don't have the space, time, or inclination to do that sort of selection.

Next, to truly create a STABLE line, where all the seeds have similar and predictable characteristics requires at least 4-5 generations of repeated breeding to stabilize the genes, with 7-8 generations really being better. So a true quality breeding project to create and stabilize a new strain can easily take two full years, or possibly longer. Again, not something the average schmoe is going to want to take on.

For most growers, its actually much more time and cost effective to just pay $100 for someone else's genetics rather than try and create their own from scratch.

Wilksey said:

Honestly, no. Botany/horticulture was never my gig, which is one of the reasons I found this place.

However, I'm learning every day.

Back in the day, weed was more of a vanilla, choc, strawberry world. At least in the area I lived in. Today it's like 31 flavors.

I guess that's a good thing.

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Yes and no.

I don't need 31 flavors of ice-cream. I just need maybe 4 or 5 that I really like.

And that's the issue.

With so many strains out there, there really is quite a variety of good ones out there.

The problem is that lots of them aren't so good, and with so many to pick from, the choice itself can be overwhelming. How do you find the ones you really like? One answer is to keep trying all sorts of them. . .explaining in part why people are always trying different seeds.

Also, the seed business being entirely unregulated and populated by lowlifes, you can run into issues where a. lots of otherwise similar strains carry different names depending on who stole them from whom, and b. different brands of the SAME strain can vary wildly in quality.

Y'all make a lot of good points.

Which is why I asked.

The problem is that lots of them aren't so good, and with so many to pick from, the choice itself can be overwhelming.

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Absolutely. I'm having that issue at the moment, however, I've been perusing the smoke reports here, and other posts, which helps a bit.

Literally, back in the day in my area, we only had like 2 types of weed: sensi, and "other". Sensi was always the goal, but often times hard to come by, and there was a LOT of "other" being doled out which was....not so good. I have only had ONE kind of weed that actually stood out, and it was supposedly "Jamaican", but I only had it one time, and my friends and I promptly crushed the only bag I could ever get. Whatever it was, it was awesome compared to the bunk we usually got.

Thanks for the input.