What a variety!
Hi, I just joined and am in the middle of my first grow. After surfing the forum I thought I would say hi and share a little. I am finishing these four White Widow plants and they look so different. The runt grew to nearly double the size of the others and looks to have a more sativa’ish look to it. I had no idea that Pheno’s could vary this much. Will be interesting trying each one. With just over two weeks to go, I’m looking for advice now for flush and harvest. Do all strains have this much variation?
- 4 Replies
The plants are in the same positions in both photos!
I haven’t grown a lot of “known” genetics to have a lot of first hand experience on the variety of expression shown within strains, however from my understanding its like familial differences.
for example, if you look at it like people, if you have a Mother and Father pair anything that is their child will be “white widow” and then anything that is “white widow” will have the genetic probability given by the combination of Mother and Father. so if Mom is blonde, and Dad is ginger, their children may have any color of hair from blonde, redish, bright red, and so on but in cannabis this is spread out over thousands of seeds, and people only have a couple kids on average. When you look at families with 10 or more kids, there is usually a varied showing of genetic traits throughout the siblings, some tall, some short, a few boys a few girls, and variance in eye and hair colors. One kid might have a heart defect, or that kid was 6ft tall at 12yo…
Conversely if you took a parental pair where both were record breaking athletes, mensa level genius’, and aesthetically “pleasing” their children would likely be naturally athletic, pretty “smart” and probably “cute” as well.
It’s the same idea in cannabis, if you have two plants that are purple, lemon scented, and produce large buds, their children will PROBABLY have large, lemony, purple buds, but not always.
When breeding plants however, you can back cross with other plants to add genetic stability by stacking the deck with a little more code from one of the parental plants. That way, when you “roll the genetic dice” you have already thrown your weighted dice in the cup. This way is more like having two athletic parents, instead of one athletic parent and one frail parent, the first example having a higher chance of producing athletic offspring, and the later having a wider variety of genetic traits in their lineage.
We need a thank you button here 😉 Good stuff. The more they are back crossed the more uniform they will be I think? I have a small breeding project in my outdoor garden, trying to figure it all out. It is more for fun, but they are good genetics one from in house (male), seed junky wedding cake, and some gorilla glue (females). Hope to find a unicorn!
Thanks for the reply Cruella, you explained it well. I can see that for consistency cloning is the way to go, but I am really interested in comparing these inter-strain varieties! I have a lot to learn before I start concentrating on a specific phenotype.
