Yeah, you've made that very clear that you're dealing with white powdery mildew. That shit never stopped one of my crops from producing. Only one of my crops ever got hit with it though, said crop was my crop of 2024. All the years before that I've been spraying my plants. Last year though, I allowed them to get hit with it. Trial by fire. Like I've said before, I'm breeding. Every plant I grew in the year of 2024, was from the same batch of seeds produced by the same female, and the same male, accept that one Transkei Durban Poison female. I originally had no intention of breeding her. I actually wanted to just cultivate her for sinsemilia bud at first. Anyway, I culled most of my males before any of my plants ever got hit with powdery mildew. Those males didn't have specific recombinations I was seeking out. By the time my plants got hit with powdery mildew, at first, it was just one male, who hadn't even shown sex yet, and two females. I just designated them as non-breeder specimens, sprayed them all down, and eventually, my plants recovered after a week to two weeks. About a month after that, pretty much all of my plants got hit with powdery mildew. Two of my males were clean, one of their sisters was also clean, and the Durban was also clean. So, I dug up both of the males that were clean, very meticulously, got both entire root stocks into some pots. I cut off most of the branches from both males, 'n castrated both of them entirely. I then brought them both over to my uncle's apartment, and I put them under some lights. I continued to stall them until all of the plants had fully flipped and finished stretching. By that point, I smell tested the pollen sacks and the pollen, from both males, the one that I liked less, had a more myrcene, beta caryophyllene, and pinene heavy chemotype. The other male however, smelled like nothing but passionfruit. He was the one who had the recombination of traits that I liked more anyway. Ergo, I took him back home, and just let him rip for a day. After that, I took him back to my uncle's apartment, and I let him finish out. He was an 8-week plant. His father was a six and a half and his mother was a nine. The sister he bred to was a 7-1/2 week finish, and the Durban was a 9-11 for sure, I didn't even wait that long, I just chopped her early at 8 weeks into season, 6 into flower. She couldn't take the cold. She did however, have a lot of traits that I've been seeking out, and her mother was a really good smoke. All I wanted were the viable seeds anyway, I didn't give a shit about smoking her. I got a couple hundred viable seeds of her own some couple thousand or so, called it a day and said "good enough"... You're probably wondering why I would be breeding a subtropical sativa if I live in Michigan, I get it... The answer is a simple one. Michigan sucks. I hate this place, I want to move back down south. Screw this. The autumns and Winters were fine the first few years, but, by this point, fuck this shit. So now I'm just collecting sativa seeds, and seeking out a new place to live somewhere to the fucking south. I seriously hate this shit. I'm literally ditching indicas over it, and breeding my hybrids back into sativas. I just can't take it, it's depressing. Anyway, regarding hardcore resistance to powdery mildew, that's a recessive trait. It's not exactly difficult to breed in. What every ganja cultivator in the world really needs, is better seeds, bred by breeders who know what they're doing and make better selections. There is no reason that something as simple as breeding out hermaphrodism, for example, should take 5 to 7 years, or even a decade, of trial and error until eventually, the breeder gets a lucky breeding pair because God felt sorry for him. It's a single point, autosomal recessive mutation, which only affects females... Breeding it out isn't exactly rocket science. Simply creating inbred lines is really not the way to do it. By that reasoning, line bred dogs are the best. Never mind the hip dysplasia, never mind the arthritis, never mind the propensity to blindness or deafness, or the propensity to cancer, or to kidney disease, or to heart failure, or the birth defects and physical deformities, shit, should I go on? Hey why don't you all check out some of the Australian cattle dogs my mother used to breed. One of them was literally missing a testicle. Brother to sister three generations in a row and then father to daughter the next generation after, what could ever go wrong?
