Cannabis is either a pure or a hybrid breed of plant, similar to anything else. While the industry has started to become more commercialized, the pure and current hybrid strains do get constantly mixed and they get remixed together, thereby creating more hybrids as a result. They are the manmade attempts at creating custom plants, and they can be both sativa, rueralis, and indica strains, where they get the traits from their parents. There are a couple of options for hybrid strain types, and they include the following:
Two sativa strains bred together
Two indica strains bred together
A sativa and indica being mixed together. This usually has traits that involve both of these kinds of cannabis. It may be tall, but the buds might be purple for instance
Indica and sativa, which has both characteristics, but the indica is much more dominant
Auto flowering cultivars that are hybrids sometimes show up too, and it gets mixed with the genetics becoming ruderalis.
The Breeding Aspect
The breeding of this is quite similar to other plants, since it involves the female plant needing the male’s pollen to finally create a new plant. This is something that works naturally, but when you create a hybrid, the breeders tend to use selective breeding where they only allow certain traits to show up in a plant.
The seeds that are crated in this are both hybrids of the parent plants, so the traits that are desired can be bred once again from these plants. Once the traits have been found, they will “cube” this, which is where they create a hybrid that’s a child with the current strain of the parents in order to keep those characteristics reinforced, and then, they repeat this across multiple generations in order to keep the characteristics stable.
They can also be bred asexually too, and this is a process where they combine this, using cloning, cutting, or even root division, and asexual reproduction allows for the plant to have the same characteristics once again, repeating this as needed to create the ultimate cannabis plant for your growing needs.
Trait dominance
It’s important to understand that there are also different aspects of dominance which can happen there. You’ve got complete dominance, which is when you have the genes that are dominant and are able to suppress those recessive aspects, which is why you see it looking more like one type of plant tan the other. With cannabis, you see this in color, where the dominant color will completely show rather than the recessive color, and usually, in first-generation plants it will show the dominance completely, with the sequence plants showing the recessive aspects of this.
Then her is incomplete dominance, which is where you see the recessive and the dominant features of the plant, and this is something that usually is different in cannabis plants. This is where the plant may show mixtures of the traits, rather than just one or the next, so it’s something that also does account for the inconsistencies in the plant itself.
Usually, this shows itself in the type of way the plant looks. For indica, it usually is more short and stubby. For sativa, they’re taller and more like a tree, and the buds are a lot fluffier. The ruderalis types will start to flower no matter what, and they’re definitely popular. All hybrid strains have all of these aspects, and it’s important to make sure that you do factor all of this in, making it something to consider when you’re breeding different cannabis plants as well too.
