Seed and Soil: Notes from the Breeder

Straight from the breeders to you - explore, learn, and laugh with our growing community!

BREEDER OF THE WEEK NASC JOURNAL FEATURE

BREEDER INTRO: BIO BLURB

Seed & Soil is a homestead seed company, a diversified farm with an acre dedicated to cannabis breeding and an acre for herb, flower, and vegetable seed production which is also our home garden. Our love for surprising and wild gardens led us down a risky path of turning a passion into a business. Cannabis has been a powerful muse and companion on the journey. Our work has been well received: we refine acclaimed strains for the Maine outdoor climate and breed exciting new varieties, especially autoflowers. But the drive behind all these efforts is to consume the best, freshest goods from our own backyard and help others do the same. Our herb, flower, vegetable and cannabis varieties are selected for diversity, beauty, taste, aroma and adaptability. Uniformity is important but more important to us is a plant’s ability to thrive in varied environmental conditions. We breed with large populations, outdoors, in native soil, using minimal inputs. This helps our neighbors have sturdy plants that don’t need to be coddled in our climate.

3 TIPS FOR NEW GROWERS:

1) Believe that it's easy! Whether you think it's easy or it's hard, you're right. The most important thing is to enjoy. Zoom out from all the specifics often and remember that the plant wants to grow and flower. Whatever you throw at it, it's working hard to reach a flowery endpoint.

2) Try BOTH autoflowers and photoperiod plants. Don't let other people's opinions and generalizations influence your discovery of these two very different categories. There's a real opportunity here if you're lucky enough to be a true naive novice. If you can put a few firsthand experiences under your belt before you dive in to all the opinions and how-to's, you might be more connected to the plant and what YOU like to do in your garden. Gardening is a lifetime hobby, with endless surprises and ever deepening lessons, so listen to the plants first.

The following information is enough to get started: both autos and photos need to reach an age of four to six weeks before they can flower. Autos begin flowering immediately when they are able, resulting in ripe flowers in about 85 days. Photos flower when the dark period (night) becomes long enough. Standard indoor dark period is 12 hours. Outdoors in the northern hemisphere, they will begin flowering in August and be ripe in the Fall. They can grow really big during the time when short summer nights prevent them from flowering. Photos don't really need delicate care as seedlings, they'll have time to bounce out of transplant shock. Autos need to be transplanted (if you're transplanting) way earlier than any other plant! We've never met a plant that is so intolerant of having its roots run out of space! The roots should barely begin to have found the edges of the pot at transplant time, so the soil might be crumbly.

Any other questions? Ask a plant and be patient!

PS - don't let me discourage you too much from researching more, my goal is that you feel released of any obligation to.

3) Don't be afraid to let the plant fend for itself. It can be really fun to spend lots of time pruning, trellising, picking off leaves etc. But there's no one right way to manage your garden.

Let's say you live in a state where you can only have two plants, why not ask a neighbor, friend, or relative to just plop a plant in their garden for you? OK, there may be some good reasons, but difficulty of maintaining the plant is not one of them! Remember, it was not so long ago that enterprising and risk-tolerant growers carried bags of manure into the distant woods, with a few seedlings, and came back to harvest in the Fall. This is possible in the growing conditions of EVERY STATE. You don't have much to lose nowadays that the laws are clear and it's easy to stay within them.

Let's say you'd like to grow a weed plant, but you're not sure you can take care of it. OK, don't take care of it! The results might surprise you.

How about this scenario: You've gone on vacation and your pretty pot plant gets battered by a midseason storm, breaking branches and snapping the plant's main stem. You could certainly take splints and tape and brace it back in to place... But perhaps you just don't really feel like it!

This third piece of advice is admittedly pretty much the same advice as the previous: Let the plant do its thing and enjoy the surprise while you see what happens.

FAVORITE BREEDING PROJECT

I wish I could say "it's so hard to pick a favorite, I love them all so much" I do love them all, but Raspberry Parfait Auto is absolutely my favorite. It started in 2019. The same day I defended my thesis for a Masters in Horticulture in Nebraska, we crammed our mattress in the back of my Honda Fit and drove to Humboldt where we spent the season helping Humboldt Seed Company with Harvest season. Raspberry Parfait was a brand new clone and its S1 seed was maturing for its initial release own the 2020 catalog. That plant was so screaming loud with fruit and flowers and sharpness. We had to harvest a breeding chamber of Bigfoot Glue one day (Humboldt's GG4), and before we did, we talked ourselves into sneaking one small gorgeous nug out of the parfait chamber. This guy Jesse was very persuasive "ahh, it's not that well seeded anyway and it wouldn't be right not to try it out", so we threw this one flower in that little spot between the front seats (same Honda Fit) under the emergency brake. We proceeded to harvest nine 27 gallon totes of glue and got all of those to fit in the Honda Fit. Little did you know this was a car advertisement... On the very short drive to the drying space, the car absolutely reeked of Raspberry Parfait.

Now it's 2020. We're working in Canada to produce Humboldt Seed Co. seeds during the first season of national regulation there. We had put some plants from reg seed of Raspberry Parfait (original clone) x PPD in a small chamber to expand that line and chase some of those terps in Canada. We also had a little terra cotta pot on our outdoor table next to the trailer we lived in featuring a very pretty Anvil X Magic Melon Auto F1. Anvil had dazzled me the previous year on color alone, it's a searing magenta fading to darker purple on the exteriors of the bud. Its vigor was also exceptional. It was a standout for me the previous year in Humboldt in a breeding chamber receiving Magic Melon fem pollen that contained an auto hunt of plenty of strains from several auto breeders doing great work at the time. The plant on our table in front of our little abode was a spunky purple little thing, showing pinkish color on the flowers from the earliest sign of flower. It was lucky that one of the parfaitXppd males matured some preflowers in August because I was able to take some of its pollen outside the remarkably secure perimeter of the license and dust our little porch plant with it.

Summer 2021. We've got our own license now in Maine. The first generation from any Auto X Photo cross contains all photoperiod sensitive plants, but they trigger into flower a little earlier. We call the "Quicks" some companies call them "Fast Versions". No matter what you call it, it's the first step in creating a new auto which was the goal of that cross of our porch plant. We had seven sister plants that needed to be bred to their brothers, of which we had four. I did branch pollinations making full-sib crosses for all possible pairs. That effort reflects an excess of enthusiasm and I'll probably never do it again, but the result was lovely. We also had our first child.

2022, still very much figuring out how to run all the aspects of the farm, life, parenthood, etc. What better time to set out the segregating F2 population of the Raspberry Parfait Auto project to the tune of 2000+ individuals? In hindsight, indeed it was the perfect time, time has only grown more scarce since then! Here's the numbers game on breeding autos. One out of four of the grandchildren of the Auto/Photo cross are autos. If they are bred to another auto, their children will be exclusively autos. This work was in reg, so half of everything is a male. Now it's 1/8 female autos. Only one grandparent was raspberry parfait, and it's anyone's guess how many alleles are involved in the je ne sais quoi of that magical clone's aroma. My best hunch said that only 1/10 female autos would be even reminiscent of Raspberry Parfait. As it panned out, indeed the 2000 seedlings were decimated down to only about 160 female autos, each lovingly hand-pollinated by a full-sibling brother that I'd saved back in a "pollen prison" in pots for the job. And out of those, only 8 advanced to the next generation. I was cautiously optimistic about these plants. They were all in the aroma ballpark, all sturdy, loving life in the sun, no straggling one bit.

Without having invested in any indoor setup the suspense lingered until Summer 2023. So much easier this time around. It only takes a few little chambers to see what was going on in these selected populations. Pick a great male or two in each and wait. And there it was. A plant that had everything and more. If the Raspberry Parfait cut screamed, this one plant climbed onto the roof of a car, nibbled a wedge of blue cheese, and bellowed into a megaphone. And maybe stepped in a little dog poop before that. It had new a funk that sent all the floral sweetness and berry energy into an even deeper part of my skull. This is a thrilling moment in breeding plants when you find THE ONE; you imagined it, knew it was possible, and worked for several years to search for it, then it's there. But it's just one out of many. This same year we had a different chamber which yielded our first release of Raspberry Parfait Auto in fem from a different line. It was lovely, but the dragons were still slumbering.

2024 found this line in another reg chamber for another full sub cross to narrow things down and see how much variability was in the population at that point. They were all lovely plants with piercing aromas, not all the same and still diverging for colors, so I chose a few favorites and made fem seeds out of them in 2025. Every plant in that chamber is a winner, the pollination was gorgeous (never a guarantee when making fem seed) At the moment of this writing, I just finished ripping the flowers off the stalks. The dragons will fly in 2026!

BREEDER OUTRO: A STORY, TO CLOSE

We are extremely ambitious. It's not easy to farm for a living, but the idea of doing anything else to support the passion we have seemed like a drag and a missed opportunity. We follow a philosophy of 'extensive farming', aiming to rely more on natural processes than control exerted by the farmer. We have a dilemma of always starting more projects than can realistically be achieved, and inevitably we prune away those projects that are weakest or most compromised as time exposes them. This year, we welcomed our second child in to this world. Life is busier and more full than ever, but it's been edging out some of our projects in the plant world. Painfully, some fem photoperiod seed production goals got messed up this season by reg pollen, so there may be a few less offerings than in years past. But we absolutely aced our year's goal of melon seed, and carrot seed too (very difficult). A nice diversity of autoflower offerings goes in the goals-achieved column this year too. Etrog auto fem seed finally looks to have succeeded and the Starlight Venom is a new auto release that just might dazzle your senses. As our works slowly unfold, we're honored by folks who follow our journey and grow the seeds we release. Believe it or not, a paper catalog is our primary piece of outreach and storytelling. Feel free to send us a message through our website (seedandsoilmaine.com) to request a catalog. But we don't sell our own stuff online, so hands up to NASC for giving the platform!