Hello Farmers, well figured I'd officially start a "breeding" thread since I just chopped some seeded ladies of my first cross. I am far from a breeder, hell, I'm just a novice hobby grower trying to make some good medicine for my wife, me and my friends and family. But I am a very meticulous (when it comes to planning, lol), I like to make a detailed guideline with contingencies included to allow for flexibility kind of mentality..... So here we are on my first pollen chucking endeavor!

Let me give you a little background on what went into our process for selecting which strains we crossed and why. I have been smoking and around growers/hustlers all my life (admittedly smoking since 15), but stopped when I got married (except when we rolled, the missus and I loved the rave/EDM scene), as that stopped because we were becoming the creepy old peeps at the raves , it was about the time of legalization and we started smoking regularly.

I have PTSD, depression, and anxiety... along with lots of aches and pains from a life of hard living, my wife also has anxiety and pains from past injuries (we in a pretty bad car crash a month before my daughter was born), so as we searched around our circles, dispensaries and black/grey market sources for strains that worked for both of us. What we found is that while some strains worked for us in some ways, none did for both of us universally. Also, the quality of what we were getting in testing the same strains from different sources, led me to the idea of growing for myself. You can say I got tired of paying other people to grow our medicine, lol!

After alot of research, some trial and lots of error, I have come to the point where I feel comfortable in my abilities and my setup and starting thinking about making our own cross to negate the necessity of having 2 strains on deck (as what we have found is usually the best case scenario for our needs). I, having that meticulous mind delved into genetics and the history of the strains that we liked. My wife and I compared notes (I made her detail her experiences, likes and dislikes), we compiled a short list of strains and I compared the genetics of them. Ultimately, we came down to 4 strains and were lucky enough to find F1s of them or versions of them.

We decided to go with MACdawg from Greenpoint seeds, and Trainwreck/Northern Lites #5 from Agseedco. MAC 1 was probably one of the first strains we smoked when we started again. We both loved it for the mental and emotional qualities it gave us, but it was lacking in body medicine. Chemdog was a classic strain that I have always loved, but my wife found it too "up" for her. Solution, Stardawg with its added afghan influence to the rescue! Trainwreck was an almost perfect strain, but it was hit of miss for the missus, in the morning it made her hazey/ evening had her awake Northern Lites #5 is another classic, and my pops/Uncle grew up in the SeaTac area in the mid to late 80s. The Afghan used is one of the ancestors to alot of strain that helped in our aches and pains, so just made sense.

So here we are, I found one male in my pack of MACdawg, I made F2s from my favorite females; one had a great purple color and an almost Rainbow Sherbert aroma, the other was structurally more MAC1 leaning, but no color, also had THE MOST WONDERFUL dawgshit dankness that is the loudest plant I have grown so far! Literally smelled like you stepped in fresh dog shit, but tasted like an Orange Julius. I popped 2 packs of Trainwreck x Northern Lites #5, 17 sprouted, I selected the best 12 seedlings and vegged them out until sexing.

I looked for vigor, stability in thier growth (no mutations), and how they handled my setup. I was left with 6 girls that I flowered out and just harvested them. I have selected the final 2 seeded ladies and will make a smoke comparison to decide. What I looked for in flower was frost, structure, and flowering length. My 2 finalists finished (to my liking) in 9 weeks and were the frostiest of the bunch. The funny thing is they are totally opposite phenos. All in all, I ended with what I'm calling 4 different expressions. My favorite is a more NLD type with bulky "Sativa" buds. The other is more wide leaf or Afghan dominant.

To us, THE EFFECT comes first, yield, terpenes and morphology are secondary. My thinking on this is that we can hunt for all of those in the offspring, but without the right initial combination of effects, it would be hard to meet all our needs. I will definitely say, it polyhybrid will be what would probably me labeled as Sativa dominant (even though I hate how the whole Sativa/Indica classifications really are not accurate), but we prefer a hazier sativa experience and not a racy one. What also made a decision and testing process a hard one, is that we need the pain relief without the heaviness some strains provide (I'm looking at you Blue Dream).

My plan is to grow 3 rounds to phenohunt with. Each round I will pop 20 seeds, veg 12, select 6 females to flower. I am currently growing out of two 3x3s, I will use one as a mother/veg tent, and the other to flower. That will give me a phenohunt where I will pop 60 seeds, veg 36, flower 18. I will keep cuts of the favorite from each round, and then do a comparison run from clones of the 3 finalists. From that we will choose our parental Sundrops plant. I have never liked the idea of having to keep mothers long term. Just not feasible for my setup at the moment, so in that regard, we want to create feminized seeds. I will use ,what I'm calling the 1-2-1 method to try and create a "stabilized" but not necessarily true breeding feminized line. That way we can get to the point where we can keep, store, and pop seeds at our leisure. Essentially once we selfed the P1 mother, we will do the same 60 seeds pheno hunt and reverse her to her mother. Then from those seeds, do the same 60 seeds hunt and choose our keeper mother. Reverse her and make more seeds than we'll need in a lifetime

I am open to and looking for all suggestions and tips from our vet growers, and hope you all will enjoy the experience as much as I am sure I will!