Me grow long time!

[Big Sur]

Historically speaking, the Spanish intentionally brought hemp to the new world to cultivate it for making rope as early as 1500. Hemp rope was and is a critical element of naval ships, up to and including WWII when it was required that farmers in the US grow hemp to supply the Navy and Merchant Marine with strong rope needed for ships. So it was commonly grown in Chile and in Mexico. In Mexico, the indigenous  people had a passion for psychotropic and psychedelic drugs and plants, and quickly figured out that hemp tops had a buzz to them after they were dried and either smoked or steeped in a tea. However, the Catholic Church was against the use of such drugs, and discouraged its use. Consequently the plant diverged in Mexico, and while hemp continued to be grown in the open, what was to become known as mota, or marijuana in Mexico was grown in small plots in rural regions away from the eyes of the Church. No one knows when the term marijuana (or Marihuana, as it is spelled there) originated in Mexico, or exactly when. Later anthropologists and botanists that studied local customs and drug uses in the 19th century were surprised when the locals showed them the plant that they steeped for tea: it was just hemp! Or so they thought. It was Cannabis sativa, but they had bred it year in and year out to result in more and more psychoactive effects. It became more prevalent in the southwest region of Mexico, especially in Oaxaca where psychedelic drugs are still revered, and in its neighboring states of Michoacan and Guerrero. Later in the late 19th and early 20th century, Marijuana was more commonly smoked alone or with tobacco, and became more prevalent in northwest Mexico. In the early 20th century reefer was commonly smoked by prisoners and by army troops, as well as sailors in the Caribbean and Central American nations. At its height, marijuana was smoked by Pancho Villa and his men, during one of many Mexican Revolutions. After that its use spread into the southwest US states. As a result of that, Mexico banned weed early in the 20th century, and California was the first state to ban weed long before the Feds did in 1936. And after that, Marijuana went underground again.

[jankahar]

On 31/01/2017 at 9:18 PM, Cannabissapean said:

Frisbees are wonderful rolling trays...

 

Trying to convince StrainHunters / GreenHouse to print the round StrainHunters Logo onto a black Frisbee to sell them in the store.

I think they would sell very well...

 

 

Big Sur, it sounds like you and I were smoking much the same things back then.

 

hehe that would be cool, i would buy one tho all my frisbees get dirty real fast so i would never mix on them, got prob 30-40 dif kinds of discs ;D

[Cannabissapean]

Then buy three.  I know I will if they ever make them available.  One for the smoke-room, one for the collection-vitrine, one to play with.  I'm a collector too.

 

I've been researching on the web.  There are a number of flying disc manufacturers.  They don't have to get them from Wham-O.  In fact there is one company in particular I saw on Youtube that seems to be like-minded with the culture that we enjoy in this forum.  They are fully equipped, even with the heated dry-ink presses for the logos.

 

Big Sur, I am really  impressed with your knowledge of cannabis history.  You explain it so well; It's as if you were there the whole time. 

I can imagine the rum was good while smoking with the Pirates of the Caribbean, but I bet the saddle-rash was a bit rough while riding with Pancho Villa...

[Big Sur]

LOL. I have been all over west Mexico, and in the Sonora desert where the Federales stuck M-16s in my face. In Mexico, you are guilty until proven poor. I was a poor hippie.

 

There are lots of songs about Pancho Villa. One is La Cucaracha (cockroach) which was the name of Pancho Villa's car that was said to run on weed.

 

La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
Ya no quieres caminar,
Porque no tienes,
Porque le falta,
Marihuana que fumar.

 

 

Then there is the one by Willie Nelson:

 

Pancho met his match you know
On the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dying words,
Ah but that's the way it goes.

 

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness, I suppose.

 

 

[Cannabissapean]

LOL

[Tiva_Lover]

On 2/6/2017 at 3:32 AM, Big Sur said:

As for my not buying seeds, another factor to that said above is that many seed companies are selling junk seeds (some seed companies outright lie), or sell seeds that are weird crosses that are basically failures. "Free" seeds are typically of these types. You can pollinate a female and get masses of seeds. The better crosses are usually few and far between. Cannabis has a huge bank of genetics, and it adapts rapidly to local environments that it is grown in. Cannabis will also do gene switching and express different phenotypes over time and in different environments. This is not just an issue with modern strains of Cannabis grown for marijuana, but has been noted when growing hemp worldwide, and described as doing so as early as several centuries ago.

 

As mentioned above, there is a lot of in-breeding being done, as well attempts to out-breed. Say, for example you have some landrace plants that you have grown for several generations. As a result of their tendency to adapt rapidly to local growing conditions, they will drift genetically. To try to keep the strain up in performance and quality, breeders try to make new crosses adding other genes to maintain or increase vigor and potency. Another factor adding to this is that there is a pool of modern strains out there now that are all basically derived from the same original strains. As a result of this breeding practice, the strains are melding into one generic type.

 

Also there has been an unintentional genetic drift (or several drifts) as the result of growing only females and culling males, as well as producing feminized seeds. These two factors have resulted in a genetic pre-disposition of these seeds to produce a higher number of females. Also there is a tendency for strains to produce larger numbers of herms. Also self crossed herms were used to produce many modern strains, many quite by accident. An example of this is ChemDog (later spelled ChemDawg, even the names drift!). ChemDog is a self cross of Dog Bud, a chance male flower that created a few seeds in an otherwise all female grow. Chem Dog is a parent of OG Kush and many Diesel strains, and the group of them are in so many strains out there now it is insane. So the herm gene is in them all as well. Wild strains also herm though, and even landrace strains that I have will herm. But the tendency is lower in wild and landrace strains. The tendency to produce males and females in landrace strains is basically 50:50. The tendency to produce males and females in modern strains is more like 40:60 male to females. This is according to Clarke in his book, Marijuana Botany.

 

WOW!  Nice post.  I just learned so much here.  I have dozens of questions now (there is so much to learn on the growing and breeding side).  But I'm still smarter after having read that.  

 

The phenomenon you and @cannabissapean describe about the homoginzation (and the lesser touched on point of breeding for the purposes of yield, flowering time, resistance to disease/pests, etc..) is the reason I became interested in LandRaces.  Even though I've never head the pure strains of yesteryear, as soon as I learned of the concern I understood the issue.  Its the same thing that's happening to our fruits & vegetables.  Companies like Monsanto (they're great guys.  Not slandering them.  Hi Monsanto attorney!) are breeding the flavor out of our fruits and vegetables so they are more profitable for farmers to grow.   A strawberry is selected to be bigger, redder, and more pest resistant.  But they taste a little like cardboard.  Worse yet, when supermarkets and produce stores buy, they buy strawberries that are picked and shipped green.  They ripen in the back of some truck on an interstate highway.  Even in summer.  

When I eat a locally grown strawberry its night and day.  They are small, imperfect, visually flawed, and soft in sports from sitting in the June sun.  But they are juicy.  Sweet.  Tart.  They have *FLAVOR*.  Nothing artificial can replicate it.  Just can't.  But its only there for a few precious weeks in June.  

 

I can only imagine there is a parallel in Marijuana crops.  

 

If you'd indulge me in bestowing more knowledge:

 

1.  So that genetic "drift" you spoke of...is that something you feel dilutes the uniqueness of the strains effects?  

2.  How do you specifically feel about some  (meaning select instances ) of the heirloom seeds that are offered by some of the seed companies?  Do you feel across the board the genetics aren't legitimate, or just that the reliability of pure genetics is too hit or miss to make purchase and grow efforts worth while (due to the high effort of actually growing the girls!)

3.  Little off topic...do hermies have any value?  I guess specifically, can you take the seeds that might come off a hermie and use them to self cross, produce more seeds, etc...or is the line (the seeds)  "ruined" after the parent goes hermie ?

[Cannabissapean]

I think Big Sur is better able to address questions 1 and 2.  I am more a consumer-type, meaning that I don't have access to a wide selection...no that's not true, I could buy like crazy, but better said:  Even though I have a relatively large collection of seeds, my collection may just be miniscule in comparison to the collection of many of you fellows out there.  I do have many more strains than I could ever possibly grow, and I don't want to just keep buying seeds that may simply wind up drying out before I can plant them.  So, that said, I am satisfied with the seeds that I have and I don't feel the need to invest in heirloom seeds.  The occasional spontaneous purchase from time to time slakes my thirst.  I would like to try some of the strrains developed inn USA and Canada, but I do not want to risk the transport issues.

It would be interesting to hear Big Sur's response to those questions, and I would find it interesting also to hear Arjan's response to compare their responses.

 

To question 3, I will offer a little something.  When a strain develops the tendancy to hermie, that is usually considered undesireable because it makes it difficult to produce sensimilla crop.

And just because you found an occasional seed on what you thought was a pure female room, is not a reason to throw away the strain.

 

And just because a plant had hermied, doesnt necessarily mean that the strain is prone to hermying.  The plant could have been stressed to hermy which is natural.

 

Remember also that the technique of producing a feminized strain does involve the application of stress to an individual female (stress whether silver colloid or pH or light-cycle disruption or temperature, etc.).  Sometimes the hermy-tendancy does pass into the offspring, sometimes not.  That's one of the things that makes the feminizing project take so long, the selection process has to be repeated several times before the strain can be declared Stable.

[Tiva_Lover]

22 hours ago, Cannabissapean said:

To question 3, I will offer a little something.  When a strain develops the tendancy to hermie, that is usually considered undesireable because it makes it difficult to produce sensimilla crop.

And just because you found an occasional seed on what you thought was a pure female room, is not a reason to throw away the strain.

 

And just because a plant had hermied, doesnt necessarily mean that the strain is prone to hermying.  The plant could have been stressed to hermy which is natural.

 

Remember also that the technique of producing a feminized strain does involve the application of stress to an individual female (stress whether silver colloid or pH or light-cycle disruption or temperature, etc.).  Sometimes the hermy-tendancy does pass into the offspring, sometimes not.  That's one of the things that makes the feminizing project take so long, the selection process has to be repeated several times before the strain can be declared Stable.

 

Interesting stuff.  So theoretically, lets say a person came across very rare seeds, or only had one seed.  This person sprouted that seed(s), and it was female.  That plant, in theory, could be "stressed" in order to turn it hermie, thereby creating seeds that could be used to keep that strain in existence, even though a male and female of the same lineage were not present?

[Big Sur]

On 2/12/2017 at 3:11 PM, Tiva_Lover said:

 

Interesting stuff.  So theoretically, lets say a person came across very rare seeds, or only had one seed.  This person sprouted that seed(s), and it was female.  That plant, in theory, could be "stressed" in order to turn it hermie, thereby creating seeds that could be used to keep that strain in existence, even though a male and female of the same lineage were not present?

 

In a word, yes. But strain preservation is a bit of a stretch. What you suggest here is actually how ChemDog (now commonly called ChemDawg) came to be. One seed of 11 from a bag of buds that was supposed to be all female tops became ChemDawg '91. The seeds were the result of what I call micro-herming. One bud created a few male flowers, or maybe only one male flower, and it popped open and dumped pollen on a small area of the plant. Those came in contact with a few female flowers (2 pollen grains to make each seed) and a few viable seeds formed. It was too small to be seen by the growers, and wound up released into the public. This was unintentional, as Dog Bud was a tightly held strain by the growers in Colorado. 

 

But what you are suggesting here can be done several ways. There are chemicals that will turn a female male and a male female. That basically messes with the plants natural hormones. You can also try stressing the plant, but that may or may not make a herm out of a female. The best way to preserve the genetics of a single seed female would be to clone it (as was done with CehmDog). That way the plant genetics are preserved, and can be cross with other strains. Or a female clone can be forced into being a pheno male, and that used to basically self cross the female clones, and make lots of seeds. Then those can be selected and culled for traits that you want. You are limiting yourself to one plant's genetics though, and from a strain perspective (or a land race one) you have lost a lot of the genetics in the field that it came from. As seen in ChemDog, we do not have the full spectrum of Dog Bud genetics any more, and just a unique plant genetics that was the best of the 11 seeds from an S1 herm. The growers of Dog Bud in Crested Butte say that the strain now extinct. Of course, Dog Bud may or may not have been cloned and/or bred the same way in Colorado. Did they grow males and cross the, for more stable seeds? Or did they grow an endless series of clones from cuttings?  Word was that  Dog Bud was a cross developed in the Emerald Triangle (likely Humboldt Co.) and who knows what the parents were, or how they were crossed.  Genetic testing may show the origins of the strain.

[Big Sur]

On 2/11/2017 at 4:10 PM, Cannabissapean said:

 

Remember also that the technique of producing a feminized strain does involve the application of stress to an individual female (stress whether silver colloid or pH or light-cycle disruption or temperature, etc.).  Sometimes the hermy-tendancy does pass into the offspring, sometimes not.  That's one of the things that makes the feminizing project take so long, the selection process has to be repeated several times before the strain can be declared Stable.

 

And this is a natural follow-on to my ChemDog/Dog Bud example above. As I have read on other sites and forums, many breeders are not interested in stabilizing strains, they are just interested in making money. The more money the better. The better Cannabis strain? Meh... lost in the race to get to the bank. It takes too long to germinate seeds, grow, select for consistency in things like size, terpenes, and bud quality, and do that for several iterations (for feminizing seeds or in standard seed runs). Many so called breeders and seed sellers have no clue as to where the strain came from, or how stable it is, or if they are prone to herming. Its too easy to breed one round and dump the resulting seeds on the market. Never mind the culled seeds that they give away for "free". Talk about watering down the genetics... they are literally dumping crap genetics on the marketplace. I have seen this with GDP. There are a lot of crappy seeds and cuts of GDP out there, at least here in Oregon. They do not have that fake grape terpene taste of the real clone-only GDP (that has survived, but seems to be more rare here now). I know of several people looking for the real deal GDP here and in Hawaii, and I wish I had kept my real deal GDP clone going for another round this year now so I could supply people with cuts of it. California Orange has become even more rare, seemingly because its orange terpenes fade as the females mature longer and stronger, so it has become nearly extinct as growers dumped it, wanting higher THC and caring less for flavors. California Orange was the development effort of Jerry Beisler in California back in 1973/4.

 

Losing genetics is an issue of all plants that are grown and cloned though, not just Cannabis. I had cymbidum orchids that were thought to be lost, but grown by a few old ladies in Carmel, California that I managed to get divisions from. My collection of orchids is on permanent loan at a friend's in Mendocino. I also had some rare 4 petal red roses from Italy but now they are lost. Similarly, roses and orchids are bred to death, and the landraces are becoming extinct in the wild. Also in the case of roses, the root stock 'multiflora' is becoming a weed in the US.

[Big Sur]

On 2/11/2017 at 3:34 PM, Tiva_Lover said:

If you'd indulge me in bestowing more knowledge:

 

1.  So that genetic "drift" you spoke of...is that something you feel dilutes the uniqueness of the strains effects?  

2.  How do you specifically feel about some  (meaning select instances ) of the heirloom seeds that are offered by some of the seed companies?  Do you feel across the board the genetics aren't legitimate, or just that the reliability of pure genetics is too hit or miss to make purchase and grow efforts worth while (due to the high effort of actually growing the girls!)

3.  Little off topic...do hermies have any value?  I guess specifically, can you take the seeds that might come off a hermie and use them to self cross, produce more seeds, etc...or is the line (the seeds)  "ruined" after the parent goes hermie ?

 

Genetic drift is highly variable in Cannabis. As written in journals and logs in the US growing hemp over the past 300 years, it was discovered early on that you have to be very diligent to select the best plants for seed, or the resulting hemp crop would decline in quality rather rapidly in its own natural tendency to adapt to local climates. Cannabis has a huge spectrum of genetics, and will rapidly adapt to new climates. It has now tapped into humans to move around the globe, and being pre-disposed to rapid adaptation, has become a global invasive weed. The understanding is that in order to maintain landrace strain genetics, you need a large plot of plants, likely about 100 plants in order to get a full array of genetic crossing every year. Then you have to select plants for seed that have the qualities of the landrace that you want to maintain. This in itself will affect the genetics though. And this is how hemp became marijuana in Mexico over several centuries. They selected higher potency plants every year and over time, <1% THC hem became upward of 10% or more THC plants. They also selected for terpenes. for example,  Oaxaca strains tend to have a very strong minty flavor to them. This is likely because there they used marijuana as a tea, rather than for smoking. 

 

As for one seed genetic traits and breeding, I covered that above. As for what seed companies are selling as landraces, that is a mixed bag. Some seed companies sell true landrace seeds from regions. Others sell 'improved' landrace strains, but IMO, they are no longer landraces if they are crossed with the likes of Billy's Big Power Bud (a made up name, there is no Billy's Big Power Bud). By crossing landraces with so called improved strains, you lose landrace genetics. Once you cross landraces with other strains, you cannot go back to get the original genetics. Some landrace genetics are there, but not all. Of course the Cannabis plant has evolved to change genetics naturally to adapt rapidly to new climates as I have pointed out above, so there are multiple schemes at work going on at the same time. So the same thing is happening with new crossed strains and seeds being sold. They are not staying stable, some growers are not patient to stabilize strains for seeds, and as a result, you are getting drift and variable quality. In both landraces and strains like GDP. Also landraces in certain regions are being crossed with ruderalis, a more vine like wild Cannabis 'species' that has the autoflowering gene. Some wild Lebanese and Mexican landrace strains are said to carry these genes now as the cartels have introduced the ruderalis genetics to get more control over flowering.

 

Herms are natural in the wild, and so the genetics have been there from the beginning. The issue is that we have increased the tendency to herm by producing fem seeds and by growing sinsemillia. Even my 1969 issue of  "the Complete Cannabis Cultivator" by Mary Jane Superweed has a section on how to make feminized seeds by forcing females to herm. Herms are how you get feminized seeds. So they have value. The issue becomes how you cross your herms to get the seeds.  It is really easy to just self cross the herm to produce fem seeds. But that tends to beget high numbers of herms. In theory you should only cross herms with females that do not tend to herm, so that the tendency of fem seeds to herm is reduced. However, I believe that using a plant that was able to be force-hermed will result in seeds that will tend to herm more than they naturally would in the wild. Much debate about this, but for this reason I do not collect or use fem seeds. Some of my landraces naturally herm though, especially from the few seeds that were found in sinsemillia bag weed. So there are multiple reasons for herm genes increasing in cannabis seeds. Personally I do not use herm plants for breeding. I just dry and smoke them. I want males for breeding with, and sexed seeds which produce females that tend not to herm. But all the rage is fem seeds to get people female plants, as well as growing sinsemillia. So the Cannabis seed genetics are drifting rapidly toward more herms. This may actually happen in the wild with plant species as well, as in stress situations, herms will survive, especially with wind pollinated plants like Cannabis. Corn is like that. They are all herms.

 

[Tiva_Lover]

6 hours ago, Big Sur said:

 

Genetic drift is highly variable in Cannabis. As written in journals and logs in the US growing hemp over the past 300 years, it was discovered early on that you have to be very diligent to select the best plants .... They are all herms.

 

 

Damn man.  I'm not saying I couldn't find all this info on google.  But it'd take hours of research.  This is like a clinic.  Thanks for taking the time to share.  

 

I've always heard its a weed.  I guess it truly is.  That's one thing I've noticed about "pests" like cockroaches, bacteria, or viruses.  They have the ability to adapt genetically at an unbelievably rapid pace.  We're running out of options to save the honey bee, while africanized bees can't be combated.  Genetics are something else.  

 

You grow some pure landraces...do you the hassle (it sounds like its difficult from your description) in maintaining the genetics of the strain are worthwhile?  Put another way: when you grow one of your pure landraces to feel the experience and quality of the high are significantly different than some of the stabilized crosses that exist today?

IE, blue dream, jack herer,  OG Kush.  Or do you think the variation in the effect is perhaps mild compared to the intertwined genetics of Billy's Big Power Bud?

 

I understand the genetics of the modern strains has been diluted as you've noted, but I'm talking about your favorite high quality hybrids compared to say, your own grow of Thai Stick.  Do you see a substantial difference in the effects?

[Cannabissapean]

Thanks, Big Sur.  I was away for a while, and I see you have provided Tiva_Lover with great info.

 

Please allow me one little correction: 

 

Tiva_Lover, if the foregoing information blew your mind, get a load of this.

 

As I understand it, the colloidal silver doesn't make a female plant into a male plant, nor does it make a male plant into a female plant.  Rather, it causes the plant to produce organs of the opposite sex, however, the half-helix DNA deposited into the zygote still represents the genetic sex of the plant.  This is a survival characteristic that has evolved in a number of organisms on earth, not just cannabis.

 

(I hadn't heard of males responding to stress, maybe that can happen, no arguement, but that is not my concentration here.)

 

As I understand it, the female plant remains female because its DNA is still female.  The silver treatment simply causes the plant to produce male organs (bananas) that in turn, produce pollen (normally, a male zygote for a male plant).  But because the plant's DNA is female, the half-helix DNA that it deposits into the pollen is also female, thereby, the pollen is now a female zygote with male 'mechanical characteristics'.  The pollen has the mechanical ability to travel (wind, bugs, Q-tips) to the pistil of the female flower, and to travel (or to be carried) through the pistil into the ovum of the female flower where it can then fertilize the female zygote.  So when that happens, the offspring that results is the re-combination of one female half-helix with another female half-helix, voila, a female seed.

Isn't that special?

 

Discussions about whether this could be possible among humans has led some researchers to postulate that sometime in the future, there may be no need for us males.  Chew on that for a while, fellows.  The women may desire to make us extinct sometime in the future.  Hell, all we do is make wars; maybe they can run things better without us...

 

And if you think Cannabissapean has gone off the deep end, go ahead and google it.  It gets scary out there in the genetic-manipulation world.

 

(Sometimes hours of research IS the fun...)  LOL

 

[Big Sur]

Yes, in all my discussions here (and elsewhere on the web), when I say that a Cannabis plant herms or flips completely to the opposite sex, it is a phenotype expression change, and not a genetic one.  Meaning that once a seed is formed, the sexual genetics of the plant is set for life. When males turn female or a females turns male (they can also do that), the genetics remain as they were originally. But... females flipped to males produce pollen only with female chromosomes. Meaning that the seeds resulting from that pollen when furtilizing a female ovum will be feminized, as they only have an X chromosome and no Y male chromosomes. That, however does not guarantee a female phenotype as a result, or a non herm. A certain percentage will flip to being pheno males early on, and many feminized seed plants will have the tendency to herm later on either from being stressed or in some cases not. This tendency to flip pheno sexual expression is a genetic trait, which we are amplifying by forcing herms (chemically or by light reduction) and producing so many feminized seeds.

 

[Big Sur]

As for doing away with males, IMO that is not going to work. Plants, animals, and fungi all formed about 1.5 billion years ago from a common simpler eukaryote ancestor. A eukaryote is an organism whose cells contain a nucleus and other organelles like the mitochondria enclosed within membranes. This is what separates us eukaryotes from prokaryotic cells (Bacteria and Archaea) that have no organelles within the cell membrane. Prokaryotic cell organisms can pick up and shed DNA as a result, and evolve rapidly. This is why and how bacteria have evolved within a few decades to become immune to antibiotics. However, with the exception of virus injecting DNA and cosmic rays causing mutations in eukaryote organisms, the genetic shedding and sharing of DNA to rapidly evolve is blocked by membrane enclosed DNA in the nuclei in eukaryote cells. So nature created a way around that by evolving sexual reproduction, and generating trillions of male DNA combinations in sperm and pollen, and by genetic recombination during meiosis after the sex gametes have combined. Take away the male gamete randomization, evolution stalls, and organisms become extinct.

 

That is my many hours in the hot tub smoking a j thoughts... anyway, after attaining several science and engineering degrees in college. In a nutshell, God does play dice with the universe. At least at the quantum level.

[Cannabissapean]

I love it, man.

[Big Sur]

16 hours ago, Tiva_Lover said:

You grow some pure landraces...do you the hassle (it sounds like its difficult from your description) in maintaining the genetics of the strain are worthwhile?  Put another way: when you grow one of your pure landraces to feel the experience and quality of the high are significantly different than some of the stabilized crosses that exist today?

IE, blue dream, jack herer,  OG Kush.  Or do you think the variation in the effect is perhaps mild compared to the intertwined genetics of Billy's Big Power Bud?

 

I understand the genetics of the modern strains has been diluted as you've noted, but I'm talking about your favorite high quality hybrids compared to say, your own grow of Thai Stick.  Do you see a substantial difference in the effects?

 

Amusing questions. No hassle involved, as when I want to grow a landrace, I just reach into my freezer and pull out landrace seeds from bag weed that I bought 30 or 40 years ago, and plant them. If I want to breed them to create examples of the landrace, I keep the males and cross them with the females. My freezing the seeds has preserved the original landrace genetics, so breeding them does not really affect my library of genetics. I have lots of seeds. My crossing them to produce seeds is simply a one-off F1, which in my opinion is valid at least for the first run due to the fact that a few landraces are going to randomly cross, regardless of there being 100, or only one male and one female. Its a philosophical thing I guess. These seeds are random examples of the landrace.

 

From an anthropological perspective, smaller populations drift faster genetically than larger populations. Just the way that it is. Humans are unlikely to change or evolve rapidly as our population is so large, that a single genetic mutation will not likely be expressed in the general population. Evolutionary change is enhanced in small populations where a single mutation is distributed in the population in later generations. In effect, modern politics and human migration and travel is blending humans faster and fostering a homogenized species, from what were diverging populations up until about 300 or so years ago.  Again, it becomes philosophical.

 

As for landrace strains vs the recent Amsterdam and NorCal crosses? One thing that I have noticed is that my landraces tend to be consistent, in that all the males grow and bloom the same and all the females grow and bloom the same. They had become fairly well standardized in their local area where they were from. The buzz factor also seems to be consistent. Is the quality and strength of the high of landraces better or worse than the recent crosses? That is purely subjective. My ex wanted stronger weed than the half dozen different Mexican landraces that I grew in Southern Oregon. Her friends typically said that my weed, "tastes like Mexican." Which was a compliment to me, but a put down by them. They wanted nuclear weed. Well, for nuclear weed, I can also grow my Colombian landrace strains like Santa Marta and Wacky Weed, which are truly psychedelic. Or Colombian lowland gold, which is stronger and more narcotic. Or, some landrace South Indian ganja sativa seeds. That stuff is truly mind bending and potent. The strongest weed I have ever smoked was south Indian ganja. A landrace sativa.

 

Perhaps the issue for me is that Billy's Super weed likely has the same genetics as many other strains that are typically a blend of Haze (Colombian, Thai, Mexican and South Indian ganja), Widow (Brazil and more SI ganja), OG whatever, an Afghan or Pakistani hash plant or three, and a few other strains that are fairly common. The more Haze-Widow-OG blends there are, the more they are becoming one modern strain. Also the things that made those building block and landrace strains unique are getting lost in the fold. For example, terpenes are being lost in the rush to grow massively high THC bud to make dabbs with.  Also there are 30 or so other cannabinols getting lost in the mix. Those have the potential for medical applications and cannot be lost to stupidity and the rush for a better high. I think that GDP has a great high and good medicinal effects for pain relief. It also has a great terpene grape flavor to it. Is it better than my early Guerrero landrace bag weed bud that knocked me on my ass back in 1975? No. They are different. I like a milder weed as well, so I can better calibrate and control my high. 3 hit weed. I also like a variety of weed around, because smoking one strain gets to be boring. So its all a matter of personal taste and preference.