What is a backcross?

Cannabis is all about breeding. Like horse breeders breeders love crossing different varieties, to create hybrids. Here too, as with horses, crossing two good varieties will create a third, even better variety.

Let's take an example. You have two strains of cannabis. The first - let's call it V1 - is quite energizing, gives you a buzz, and your artistic soul resurfaces. The problem? You can't sleep.

The next day, you leave V1 in your drawer, and pick up another one, the V2 variety. It's powerful, soothes the aches and pains when you come back from kickboxing, and helps you fall asleep. The problem? You can't wake up.

In short, you decide to cross these two varieties with each other, to obtain a happy medium. To do this, you take a small paintbrush, onto which you place some V1 pollen, and then you put it on the brush. place on the pistils of V2. Some time later, your V2 will naturally go to seed: these are V3 seeds, a V1/V2 hybrid.

You're going to plant several of these V3 seeds, to grow a cannabis plant. But you're disappointed. From one seed to the next, the effects are totally different: one day you fall asleep, the next you listen to music all night long. So you've created an «unstable» V3 variety. This means that it contains several phenotypes.

To change it from «unstable» to «stable», you need to make a backcross, or back-crossing.

Cross-breeding a hybrid with its parent to stabilize it

Before doing this backcross, you'll just have to wait for the big day. The day when you come across the perfect V3 seed, which marvelously combines the qualities of its V1 and V2 parents. When you have this V3 seed in your hands, you're going to backcross.

To do this, you'll cross your V3 again with one of its parents, V1 or V2, or with itself. If you want V3 to be more high, you cross it with V1. If you want it to be more stone, you use V2. And so on, until you reach the desired result.

In short, the backcross This means crossing a hybrid with a parent. This will strengthen its characteristics and, above all, make it stable. The more you backcross The more stable a hybrid is, the more likely it is to become a variety in its own right.

This is how the greatest breeders of recent years. This is the case, for example, for the Deedee story. This exceptional variety - whose flowers resemble popcorn - was tinkered with for several years before arriving at the stabilized version we know today.

However, backcrossing can also be overdone. If a plant is crossed too often, negative recessive genes can appear in the offspring.

In backcrossing, the best male plant (instead of the female) is usually selected for backcrossing with the mother plant. It usually takes four to five generations of crossing before the cross acquires the desired constant characteristics. At this stage, the stabilized male and female cross can be crossed, producing a new cross.