Breeding for whorls

[Sativied]

Hi Farmers,

After a not so successful attempt to create some fem seeds (Chocolate Fondue x Skywalker Kush) and ending up with 2 seeds of which only one was ripe, I figured I should do a regular seed run first. Chuck some breeding stock. The overall goal was to create three different strains, body relaxer (indica dom), creative high, and late night (keeps you awake/energetic). Have to be relatively short, respond well to being in a hydroponic nutes solution 24/7, frosty, suitable for scrog/crop/top/lst aka canopy control. Quantity secondary to quality but of course prefer big buds nonetheless.

19 years ago I worked in a coffeeshop and the flower menu looked like this: Skunk, Super Skunk, Northern Light, Hindu Kush, Orange, Shiva, Afghani, and Haze. Nearly 20 years later I realized I've been smoking pretty much the same strains, mixes/hybrids of those, since. So I wanted to go back to basics and create something myself. I picked Cannalope Haze because of its listed parents (O Haze x Mex Sativa). After the first seed run and a regular run to fill up the jars, I caught up with it's dubious history. Give the results I got so far I can't say I'm disappointed that it's a C99 knockoff, but it's again Skunk, NL, O Haze, and JH, i.e. based on the same old IBLs. Not stating that is a bad thing, just ironic cause it's the opposite of what I wanted.

After killing several males, I ended up with two that had whorled phyllotaxy and had frosty fan leaves and strong smell. After topping I noticed one of them was actually quad-whorled, i.e. 4 leaves on the same level.

Some pics:

Next is actually from another male but shows the sparkles better. All offspring (about 50 I tested so far) is sparkly from day 1 (examples at https://www.thcfarmer.com/community...r-frostiest-plants.58222/page-27#post-1248246 )

Will post the female parents and offspring in following posts.

 

[CBDEMON]

That one unique, badass lookin' male specimen you've got there. I'm subbed on this one! Very intriguing to see a quad whorled plant in general- but a frosty male version! Great stuff, thanks for posting your observations. Looking forward to updates.

 

[Sativied]

For the mothers of the initial seed run I used 3 different strains, in addition to two different phenos (haze and the actually 8-weker) of CH itself: ICE, a Chunk, and Late Night.

ICE (offspring is 'IH')
The ICE seeds were given to me 8 years ago by a hobby bean maker and have been in my fridge for the majority of those years. Beautiful vigorous strong plants, but the taste and smell isn't particularly good. It barely smells and tastes pretty horrible. Effect is typical indica, strong too. Frosty calyxes but few trichs on the sugar leaves. Small calyxes, i.e not very chunky. Good yielder nonetheless. Barely needs vegging and still ended up huge. Didn't require topping either, those lowest branches made it all the way to an almost flat canopy.

Seeded bud, notice the lack of sugar on the leaves (to see the difference with her offspring later :) )

a Chunk (offspring is 'P')
'a' Chunk cause I'm not sure about its genetics. I received these from a grower who removed a male too late. Great yielder, huge plants (some increased 800% during transition, from 8 inch to 6 feet). Super frosty.

Sensitive to N (gets dark and claws easily), noticing that a little bit in the offspring too.

Late Night
That one viable seed I got from that fem seed attempt (with Tiresias Mist, got sterile paste instead of powdery pollen) turned out to be special - of course :D I got pollen from a Skywalker Kush plant and used it on a Chocolate Fondue female BUT I have my doubts the couple of seeds are actually from the SK pollen. I think it either selfed or some pollen from a neighboring grower blew in...

Pollinated:

The downside of this one is that it stretched enormously during transition. It is honestly in the top 5 of best flower I have ever smoked. The Chocolate Fondue too, but this one turned out to be sweeter haze and without the chocolate. If the offspring of Late Night x CH isn't good enough I will probably cross it with the IH cross at some point, hoping to retain its taste and smell.

I popped a few of the Late Night x CH cross (which I still refer to as Late Night) just out of curiosity but for now the focus will be more on the IH (ICE x CH) and P (Chunk x CH) cross. I expected to focus on the P solely at first but than I noticed things started whorling.... to be continued. :) (offspring coming up)

 

[Sativied]

then I noticed things started whorling... :bookworm:

Anyway, I was a little worried I wouldn't get enough seeds because of that first attempt so got a little carried away and ended up with thousands of ripe pretty seeds. Couple of hundred P (large like the mom's calyxes), hundreds of IH, and lots of Late Night and CH x CH.

I originally didn't plan to try and breed for the whorling in particular. The parents are all gone including that male. I basically wanted to have plenty of seeds to select plants from to create my own parents (I got time :)) and I never planned to recreate any of these F1 crosses. I do have some of the male's pollen frozen for a back cross just for fun (i.e. testing the whorl ratio).

I also didn't expect the whorling to inherit this - seemingly - easy. I expected it to either disappear in further generations, be sex-linked, or be recessive and only show in F2 (all based on erroneous sources).

I started with popping 12 of the P seeds, removed 6 before fully reaching veg stage (small DWC preveg/clone boxes) based on root development in less than ideal nute solution temps (ie. non-chilled). The other 6 I topped early on, and used those top cuttings to make clones and put the plants from which I took those cuttings on 12/12 to sex them.

Repeated the same process for the IH cross. The plants I'm flowering now are the tops of those sexed plants. I can't remove plants from my tubes without ripping up the root mass so had to pre-sex them sort of. I'm currently in the stage of testing the crosses to see if there even are females worth taking to further generations. That may not take as many rounds as I expected...

This was IH#2, another whorling female. A lateral shoot after topping and sexing, put it my living room just to observe.

At first I thought none of the plants whorled and but as I mentioned earlier, it takes a certain maturity level, i.e. the whorl in my plants only appears after it's a seedling and doesn't start out as a tricot. One of the fascinating things about the whorling behavior is the golden angle. I'll show some more examples later, but it's a perfect golden angle every single time.

Imagine your looking down on to a stem, exactly from above, that would look like a circle: O

-0- <--- a stem with two leaves. I'm only speculating (though based on a good amount of research) but it seems that auxin concentrations determine where a leaf starts, but also depletes some of the auxins around that area, creating a sort of hotspot. The opposite site of the stem is least affected by the start of the leaf, allowing an auxin concentration high enough to create a leaf there too.



My theory lines up with my perception (possibly with the latter influencing the former a lot :) ). What happens is that after several regular opposite phyllotaxy nodes is that one node turns (golden angle) and a node later that leaves enough space (and auxins) for a third leaf to spawn.

So after noticing that, I started keeping a close eye on the phyllotaxy in all my plants. It started to look like there was an actually ratio of whorled plants in the offspring, but couldn't tell because I killed more than half before the whorling started to show. In hindsight it could actually be possible that all of the IH plants are whorled. Getting more and more intrigued with whorled phyllotaxty I decided to pop some more seeds just to see if there's a ratio or certain frequency.

The one in the bottom right is a 'unicot', i.e. only one cotyledon. It came out of the same seed as the second seedling from the top left. Killed it for going to slow.

I'm testing a container/bottle 'method' from a belgium professor just for fun, at the same time, ended up drowning them after transplanting to 1 liter bottles and spilled DWC nute solution on top of them :oops: so they had a rough time. I assume they'll make it, will post updates soon. They all look regular opposite at that point, but so did the quad male. As I mentioned in a post above, the ICE mom had very little sugar on its leaves. Here's one of the above that looks like it will whorl eventually:

Given that all offspring from the 3 crosses are this sparkly from day 1, that means I got a lot of frosty males as well. I have yet to see what buds and sugar leaves look like eventually but it looks pretty-pretty so far. In addition to these I popped about 10 of the Late Night and P seeds, don't really have space for them. I planned to place the 14 above in my flower closet, but I don't think I will have enough space left.

Here's one of the Late Night seedlings in better shape:

Saved the best for last, next post the 5 out of the 24 (12IH and 12P) I got in my flower closet, flipped to 12/12 about 4 days ago.

 

[Tnelz]

Great thread. Ur set up looks dope too. Very interested in what happens. I'll be watching for sure. Thanks bro.

 

[Sativied]

Thanks, let me provide some more info about my setup for completeness.

My flower closet is 4x4' since last fall (3x4' before that). 400watt during 18/6, 600watt during 12/12. This is the 5th run on this setup (before that on soil, organic), which is basically an aqua pump pumping nute solution through two 5" tubes. After growing 5-6' tall trees a couple of rounds I managed to get it dialed in pretty well. I do have a pretty decent chiller but hardly use it (not needed most of the year and with closed canopy and 12/12 cycle). I started out with nearly the complete H&G line, now only use AB and a bit of GHE Bloom to change the ratio a little during flowering. And drip clean. No stims, no boosters/shooters, bennies, h202/bleach etc. I do use cannazym in my unchilled veg DWC boxes.

I have 2 small preveg/clone/germ boxes with 3x18watt T8 each, and a small 'pollen shelter' with 30w cfl for male/reversed branches. Unfortunately space is a major issue for me but I just have to work around that as much as possible.

After the initial seed run I did a quick run with female CH clones from two plants to fill up the jars. Clones of the two I used for the CH x CH seeds.

Start week 5:

Non-haze pheno:

Haze-pheno:

Couple of days before harvest (cropped/spread out too far so needed a bit of support).

During cleanup, pulled roots out through one plant site:

 

[CBDEMON]

Damn, that is in a 4x4? now that's using space efficiently! Excellent work

 

[stickyfing3rs]

Looks like a nice setup man. When you say h&g nutes you talkin aqua flakes? If so your regimen is almost identical to mine. Never any boosters or other bullshit, all that does is gunk stuff up. Thought maybe I was the only crazy one here.

 

[stickyfing3rs]

Also, the setup I had about a year ago was really similar to yours. I had 4 6" pvc pipes side by side with a tube that was adjustable at one end to control water level (like the aerojet machines have), worked great. Two thumbs up here bud. Lol

 

[Sativied]

Thanks :) On top of having limited space for breeding projects I also want to be able to supply myself and my wife with plenty of homegrown so I don't have to waste money in coffeeshops buying not-so-great quality. Additionally I'm still sort of legal-ish with 5 plants and not in big trouble with a few more. I hope by the time I picked enough plants for F2 seeds, which should show more variation, I will have some more space. If that fails... it's kinda why I'm messing with 1 liter coco bottles - I'm considering to do a sog with at least 7x7 so I can do a somewhat proper selection.

Ok, the 6 plants I currently got in my flower closet:

Let's start with the main candidate, IH#5. She is tri-whorled, neatly too. I'm really excited about this one, from the start (while sexing the plant I took this clone from). Here's why initially (still seedling)

And then it started to whorl on top of it. Took the whorled part as a cutting and here she is after transplant to the tubes and a couple of days:

Two above form May 9, following is May 15:

May 21:

Yesterday-ish:

(IH#5 between the 2 white lines)

I have this thing for flat canopies, last seed run I didn't even bother considering the variety (4 strains), I'm going to make an attempt this time:

I'll cover the rest of the family in following post(s). Time to roll one first Thanks for reading if you made it this far :)

 

[Sativied]

with a tube that was adjustable at one end to control water level (like the aerojet machines have), worked great. Two thumbs up here bud. Lol

Thanks, I use a sort of adapter pvc piece as a dam, a 5" endcap with a 40mm off-center hole in it. I can turn the endcap to raise/lower the level (upfront, not during the grow). I guess most people refer to it as flooded tubes, I prefer the term DFT (deep flow technique, opposed to NFT where a thin layer ensures aeration DFT is about flowing and continues circulation, hence waterfall on the returning ends). At some point I will rebuild and omit the sprayers that supply the nutrient solution to the larger tubes and just pump it in at one end. I already replaced the 360 micro sprayers with a more open 180 sprayer to increase the flow.

When you say h&g nutes you talkin aqua flakes? If so your regimen is almost identical to mine. Never any boosters or other bullshit, all that does is gunk stuff up. Thought maybe I was the only crazy one here.

I should and will be using Aqua Flakes, but actually use the regular Hydro AB. I started with a starter kit (included most of the line) which at the shop I go too was only available as Hydro. Pretty good deal by itself (a little over $100 for a load of bottles and shooting powder). Knowing I would run out of the 1 liter AB bottles it included I got 5 liters of AB each on top of, which I still use 20 months later. I ran at 1000+ppm those first runs. Actually liked 'playing' with all the bottles but started reading up on plant nutrient uptake and once the additive bottles depleted I started noticing I was doing not only as well, but even better. That run above was 480 ppm from start to finish (except first and last week, ie. even lower then). I use the GHE Bloom because there's a tad too much N in the H&G AB. So not as an additive but replacing a portion of the AB (during full on flowering). The challenge with H&G alone wasn't keeping them green but preventing them from getting too dark. For me anyway, with nearly a dozen different strains though. Not sure if there's an actually N diff between Hydro and Aqua (more Mg and Iron), will be able to compare once I'm out of Hydro AB soon.

 

[stickyfing3rs]

Ya for ppms I normally never hit over 300, I always see them expensive bottles of additives sitting in the shelf as I reach for the a&b and think about it for about 1 second. Then I remember, like you said. Stuff is so much healthier and vigorous its a no brainer. Great work again man, looking forward to your updates

 

[Sativied]

Next up is is IH#1. This was supposed to be a regular opposite phyllotaxy control plant...

Wave to the security guard :happy:

Comparing IH#1 to IH#5 clearly showed the - what I consider - main advantage of tri-whorled phyllotaxy, an increased veg rate, i.e. decreased veg time. With regular phyllotaxy the leaves of every other node overlap each others (even nodes overlap even, uneven overlaps uneven). With neatly tri-whorled phyllotaxy there is not only a 3rd leaf (and lateral shoot), but it also whorls, or spirals...

Spiral phyllotaxy is sort of in between regular and whorled phyllotaxy. The difference with spiral and whorled is that with the latter the leaves start on the same level. An architect tried to apply this principle (of better light interception) to a building:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Saleh_Masoumi/Phyllotaxy_towers

IH#5, the whorled one, clearly increases in size much faster. But then this happened:

Notice how that fan leave north east of the center took a turn, at again a golden angle.

After topping them it got so bushy and being so mature that the alternating is making it difficult to further observe the whorling on this one. I still like her cause she has more sativa-ish leaves than IH#5.

I'm going to use the IH#5, the neatly whorled one, to create seeds by selfing, by backcross (if pollen in freezer is still viable), and will be looking for a tri-whorled male and possible female.

 

[Sativied]

One of the supposed downsides of mutations like this is that they aren't always stable. How much truth is in there I simply cannot say, but I do get the impression the IH is somehow able to handle the whorling better. I haven't popped enough yet to really make that conclusion, but, all the IH plants so far are from seedling on 'neat', i.e. nothing weird, neat leaves from the first set and onward. The P plants however produced a few freaks so far. Including a quad that was missing its terminal shoot after the first set of leaves, wrangled leaves (unfortunately no pic). I also got this one, which has a different mutation called fasciation. It's P#5 in the center in the front in the group shots.

P#5, just rooted and transplanted to tubes:

The leaves are blocking the view a bit, but notice how the stem sort of double horizontally. It continued to do that several times:

I won't be creating offspring with this one, just flowering it out of curiosity. Some leaves don't come with a lateral shoot above it and it's not as vigorous as the rest, it sort of got in the way of itself initially. Branches are thing and lanky, I may reduce her to just the main bud site depending on how large the plants next to it get.

 

[Sativied]

Older pic with labels again. Notice the obvious difference between IH#1 and IH#5 (whorled)

P#1A and P#1B are both clones from the same promising looking plant (during sexing). The plant from which I took these clones was whorled. A is more whorled than B which seems to be all due to B having a slow start. P#1A had a hard time staying in veg mode, even on 20/4. Reverted back to 3 and 1 leaflet per leaf, which are now the larger fan leaves. Took a few days 24 hrs light to get it back to vegging.

P#1B

Couple of days ago:

With looking promising during sexing I meant in particular that it didn't stretch a lot and branched out nicely. Going into flower and back made it way bushier than planned. P#1B is from the same plant so should give a better perspective.

Last but not least is P#6. Regular opposite phyllotaxy. Was a back up plant, didn't know its sex either, used it to replace P#4, which was whorled too but not a very successful clone. I didn't top P#6 but pinched+bend the main stem. Nice structure overall, but may stretch a bit too much. Smells great but that's something they all got in common.

Ok... I think that covers it for now :happy: I switched to 12/12 about 4-5 days ago, being that they are all mature (pre-flowers for a while already) I hope to be able to see flowers and buds soon and that they will be good enough to continue working with these. Will post updates soon.

 

[Sativied]

I have a clone of IH#5, the large whorled one, which is from topping the one currently in the flower closet. So that one is still neatly tri-whorled. I wanted to make sure I had plenty of clones from this one so I used some of the pruned parts and stuck those into rockwool and coco. Here's one in coco, no dome (ambient RH 50-ish %), cutting taken less than a week ago, stuck in small 1" cactus pot with coco after dipping stem in rooting gel and then powder (prevents the gel from get soaked up in the medium). Just picked it up to moisten it, didn't expect to see roots already.

It's a lateral of a lateral. I'm curious to see if it will start whorling (again). I expect that will depend on how fast it matures, if it alternates heavily it won't whorl.

One or more of the clones should be big enough in time to take clones from for next round. Only things that can spoil it now, the IH#5, is it producing airy buds that taste horrible. If it however produces big smelly tasty buds, I will probably put the P and Late Night on hold for a while and focus on the IH only (looking for a frosty tri-whorled male would be next step).

 

[Sativied]

Ya for ppms I normally never hit over 300, I always see them expensive bottles of additives sitting in the shelf as I reach for the a&b and think about it for about 1 second. Then I remember, like you said. Stuff is so much healthier and vigorous its a no brainer. Great work again man, looking forward to your updates

I could probably go as low as 300 if I would use a larger rez. Currently 14gallon roughly. I use tap water, but based on an analysis it's actually pretty good. The 40-ish ppm natrium isn't, but besides that it's mostly Ca, some Mg and free micros. For example, yesterday I refreshed and set the ppm to 380, about 12 hours later it was 320. So I have to go a little higher else it will drop further to a point where it gets too low and I have to add nutes too often. I will more than likely not exceed the 480ppm of last round, probably 400-450 the rest of the run.


I planted 10 of the CH x CH (= CH99?) a couple of days ago, don't have the space the grow those out but wanted to check two things, 1. possible freaks, 2. are they as frosty as the 3 out-crosses. They all came up nearly simultaneously, about 12 hours too soon to tell but it looks like they are 'not' as frosty (and look normal so far). Pics tomorrow or so.

I have a Late Night test plant in a one liter coco bottle and the test seems to serve its purpose, a little too soon to tell but I think the Late Night is too stretchy to continue working with for now, will have to cross it with the P or IH once I got those stable-ish to try and save the taste of the Late Night.

 

[polysaprobic]

Funky plants, but what benefit do you see in plants with whorled phyllotaxy?

 

[Sativied]

Hi,

I covered that a bit in a previous post:

Comparing IH#1 to IH#5 clearly showed the - what I consider - main advantage of tri-whorled phyllotaxy, an increased veg rate, i.e. decreased veg time. With regular phyllotaxy the leaves of every other node overlap each others (even nodes overlap even, uneven overlaps uneven). With neatly tri-whorled phyllotaxy there is not only a 3rd leaf (and lateral shoot), but it also whorls, or spirals...

Spiral phyllotaxy is sort of in between regular and whorled phyllotaxy. The difference with spiral and whorled is that with the latter the leaves start on the same level. An architect tried to apply this principle (of better light interception) to a building:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Saleh_Masoumi/Phyllotaxy_towers

Phyllotaxy is all about leaf arrangement which in turn is all about presenting leaves to the sun. Whorled is mathematically and in practice (clearly noticeable in veg/early stage) a more efficient form of phyllotaxy than opposite (because there's less overlap*). The benefit sort of disappears when buds form and may effectively turn in to a negative (i.e. too leafy and too branchy) for all I know.

*This reduced self-shadowing also reduced stem and petiole elongation, one of my main goals with all 3 strains.

Simply put, it creates the 3rd lateral (+aux bud) at the same rate a regular creates 2. I have no delusions that will translate to 50% extra bud. It doesn't have to either, it only has to produce regular/decent sized buds. If they are, and I manage to breed this into following generations I will do side by side again (if I have any non-whorled that is :) ). I could fill my closet with 4xIH5 instead of 6x a regular - in the same time (think plant count limit laws). Great for lst/cropping/topping as well, top after 3rd node and get 9 bud sites instead of 6.

Not a great example, one of the IH I put in my living room after sexing and topping and stretched its petioles, but notice the lack of overlap of the leaves. Tri-whorled has 6 non-overlapping leaves (per vertical branch or the meristem during preveg), regular opposite at max 4.

IH#5

IH#1 (day 7-ish 12/12)

Still leveled enough. I use a Gavita tripple star hood which creates a 90%+ uniform spreading of the light else I'd crop it into a valley (think quarter-pipe).

The quarter top right is all IH#5 (took quite a few clones and 'shaved the legs' else it would have 40-50 small budsites by now....)

The CHxCH sparkly test, I spoke too soon, they turned sparkly within 36 hours just like the outcrosses.

20 hours ago:

Now (touched by Voldemort)

The coco bottle test with a Late Night tester (took me a while to tune in manually watering and feeding). As its mom, way too stretchy, very strong apical dominance (no later shoots at the top half of the plant created during transition). I'll probably test a few more in a few months but this cross is staying in the fridge for now.

Note: I call them "sparkles" because they are not just non-glandular hairs and not glandular trichs on a stalk either, just the secretory head. :writing: I'm very curious to see if the regular frost is going to be 'added' or replacing the sparkles. I will do a lab test sooner or later and will test one of the seedlings in addition to buds to see what's in it.

 

[Sativied]

Additionally, an easy comparison. IH#1 and 5 were rooted nearly simultaneously, this is after a week in small DWC preveg and a day or so in the tubes:

May 9:

June 2 (for me anyway, pic says 3 very early in the morning :) )