You are very welcome
Listing the traits you stated for each strain and comparing them to the final male you’d like to have, we can see which ingredients you’ll need to draw on for which aspects.
LANDRACE
- easy grow
- adaptable
- resistant
- strong structure
- odorous
- high yield
INDICA
- vigorous
- odorous
- high resin
- long lasting high
SATIVA
- high without a ceiling
- long lasting high
- high resin
- high yield
FINAL 3-WAY MALE
- strong structure
- medium height
- high without a ceiling
- long lasting high
- high resin
We can see which traits the 3 ingredients can contribute (in red). It seems that while the landrace has some desirable qualities in general, they aren’t really that impactful considering what you’d like to get from your male. The only thing you explicitly mentioned that was not in either of the other two is “
strong structure”. You may be able to just work a hybrid of the Sativa dom x Indica dom plants and find a male that embodies what you’d like considering these two include the majority of the goals you want.
The trait that seems to be your most important is the high without a ceiling. Since this trait is going to be the most important, I would try to work in this trait from the Sativa dom at the final cross so as not to “water it down”. The fact that both Sativa and Indica plants have the high resin production and potent effect, suggests that the landrace may be the better choice for your initial F1 to impart the structure without risking washing out the Sativa dom effect in the later inclusion of the third strain.
I might start with the
(Indica x Landrace)F1. You mentioned the Landrace throwing out exceptional males and you’ll want to be able to select and use the most resinous Indica female, so to me the best bet would be the use the Indica as the female and Landrace as the male. You’ll be able to select the progeny with the most desirable structure early in veg while also assessing frost production in later veg during stem rubs as frosty males will usually express this trait before flower. This allows you to establish a plant with the strong structure of the Landrace with the increased resin production of the Indica based solely on pre flower observables.
If you’re finding tons of great male candidates from this cross, then I would use some of the less prioritized traits to further narrow down the selection (odor, leaf aesthetics, vigor, etc.) Assuming your indica is of the short variety and the landrace sativa is of the crazy stretch variety, I would err on the side of shorter considering you still have another sativa to introduce and you want to end up with medium sized plants.
At this point, you’d have a pretty solid plant that checks off “strong structure” and “resinous” from your final list of traits. If you wanted to further assess what other “female” traits this male passed on, you’d have to cross him to a few females you’re familiar with and grow out the progeny to see what exactly he brings to the table. Assuming you did not want to take that time-consuming step, I would move on to cross this strong structure resinous plant with the Sativa dom plant.
As before, we’ll have the female in this cross be the plant which has the target chemotype/resin production, since we can ensure these traits exist in the female plant. I would take the Sativa dom which best expresses the high with no ceiling and cross her with the (
Indica x Landrace) male that has the strong structure and high resin production.
With the 3-way cross made, I would then hunt through these seeds to find the plant that best exemplifies the goals laid out for your final male. I know you want males, but I would also flower out at least a few females that most closely resemble the phenotype you’ve crowned the winner in the male(s), so that you can get an idea of how that phenotype may express in female form. Beyond getting a clue of how the male would perform expressing female traits, you now have the ingredients to further stabilize your new strain with filial breeding.
Stabilizing a strain usually means to reduce the variance such that the range of phenotypes converges on the breeder’s selected expression. Backcrossing would take the new 3-way cross and increase the contribution from the parent that you backcrossed to, potentially losing traits you selected for in the earlier processes. I would definitely filial breed the last cross
[Sativa dom X (Indica x Landrace)] to further F2,F3,… generations to “lock down” the desirable expression. Since you’d be working within the line, you wont necessarily be skewing your [
50%Sativa, 25%Indica, 25%Landrace] 3-way. If you felt that backcrossing an F2 plant back to a male or female 3-way-plant from the F1 or P1, then you would still be working within your 3-way line and could better hone in on a truer breeding version of your target male.
Using a Punnett square, let’s assume you pop seeds from the final cross and find a female and male that both have the strong structure. Since we can only observe the dominant trait, let’s assume they are at least heterozygous for strong structure (Aa), where ‘A’ represents dominant structure and ‘a’ represent recessive weak structure. If we cross them, we get:
The (aa) plant is going to be weak structured and can be culled on sight. The remaining three plants will all have the dominant structure ‘A’. What we would like to have is the one ‘AA’ plant because it has been “stabilized” to be a plant that is true breeding for strong structure. You would not know this plant from the other two unless you crossed the three to other plants to see which produces all strong structured plants.
In essence, this is what you are doing when you are trying to stabilize a line. Now try juggling all of the traits you’d like to stabilize without the benefit of a genomics lab and you can see where the science of breeding starts to become the art of breeding.
This is just a proposed approach I would use given the information you have provided and the considerations you’d like in the final 3-way crossed plant. It is by no means the only way to go about your project and remember, I’m just some guy on the internet, so this is just for your consideration.
