how I planted 20 orange seeds of the same strain in my garden, but yet they are all different. I keep wondering Why?”
Yes I found out the reason from different research I carried out years ago and its good I share the knowledge here to education our Agro women in the house simile.
I pop a bunch of orange seeds of the same strain, and yet every single one was different? Did you wonder if you did something wrong, or maybe the seed bank ripped you off?
Most likely, the truth is that you did nothing wrong, and the seed bank did not rip you off. Instead, you are looking at the phenotypic variety that can be expressed by the cannabis strain you selected.
Growing from Seed can result in a lot of variation among your plants.
In this section, we will discuss how seeds produce different phenotypes. Later will discuss how to apply pheno hunting to your growing practices.
What is phenotypic variety? Well in this article, we will explain how there can be variances among plants of the same strain. Before you select and maintain a mother for cloning, you must first ensure you have selected the right phenotype.
Seeds are the Children of Mother and Father plants
The act of breeding cannabis involves taking pollen from a male and fertilizing the female plant. This sexual conception will yield offspring that share traits of both the mother and the father. This is how new strain varieties are created.
The offspring of two plants should represent the traits of those two plants. But will it represent those traits equally? Or will it be dominated by traits of the father? Or the mother?
If there are multiple offspring, will they all share these traits equally?
Each Seed is a different Phenotype of the same Cultivar, Strain Variety
The concept of phenotypic variety is easy to understand when you consider that most brothers and sisters are both alike but different.
Your mom and dad had kids, and their kids were all different. Sure, there are similarities among all of them, but they are all different in one way or another. Sometimes the differences among offspring can be stark. And sometimes, two parents had a group of kids, and they are turned out pretty similar. That happens too.
And the same thing happens with cannabis. Every seed from a cannabis plant represents both the parent strain as well as its own unique identity.
Genotype vs. Phenotype
If we are to take the scientific language of biology and translate into cannabis, it goes a little something like this:
Genotype is the strain itself.
Phenotype is one individual version of the strain.
The genotype is the family name, say the “Smith Family.” John Smith and Pocahontas came together and formed the Smith family. The descendants that come thereafter will share the name “Smith” and will be members of the “Smith family,” but each will be a different phenotype with his or her own unique differences, along with shared similarities.
Why are there so many differences between phenotypes
There are several reasons why phenotypes can express differently. The first point we have already covered. The seeds of a cannabis plant are like children, and they will all have unique individual differences while sharing general similarities. There are other reasons, though.
One is that newer strains tend to have greater variation. This is because the breeder could have put the strain out even though it was a first generation. Strains become more stable when they are replicated for many generations, but this takes years.
When a breeder crosses a male and female, and gets seeds, that is merely one generation. The seeds from this cross would be considered Fe1.
If the breeder were to pop those seeds, select a male and a female, and cross those two phenos, then we would have an Fe2. That is because we took seeds of the same strain, and crossed them again.
Anything less than an Fe1 will have great variation. But an Fe2 will not be as stable as an Fe3, and so on.
I hope you stay turn with my other discovered fruit paste that destroy fruit.