skychaser
Well-Known Member
When growing any heirloom strain of plant for seed, be it tobacco or anything else, I do not try to select seed plants for any particular trait I personally think is best. In fact it is just the opposite. I want a big population of uniform plants to select as seed plants, what ever uniformity represents in that particualr strain. That extra large plant with the big leaves gets culled. And anything else that is not true to type of the overall average gets culled. Even with plants that are often already very inbred like tobacco, I strictly follow the 20/100 rule of genetics for plant breeding. I want both diversity and uniformity. Saving seed from just a plant or two may be fine for your own personal use. But imho, it is a horrible thing to do when trying to maintain a strain as it is, or for re-sale. Bottle necking the gene pool may have disastrous effects in future generations down the line. Or it may not. You roll the dice. It's called epigenetics. You can lose genes not visible in the current crop that may be essential for the plants long term survival.