To chuck (or "chuck pollen") is slang for pollinating a plant or a whole room, usually as a quick one-off cross. The word is neutral among friends ("I chucked my male at the whole tent") and critical when applied to someone selling the result.
In practice
A home grower might keep one male, collect a few hundred milligrams of pollen and dust a single lower branch of each female, which is a controlled way to get seed without seeding the whole crop. "Chucking the room" means letting a male open freely among the females, so every plant sets seed and parentage of each seed is unknown. That is open pollination.
What separates a useful chuck from a careless one is records: which female, which male, which branch, the date, and how many seeds came back. Without those, the seed cannot be traced and a later problem (herms, off-types) cannot be tracked to its source.
Don't confuse with
- Pollen chucker: the person, and the criticism. Chucking once for your own garden does not make you one.
- Selfing: pollinating a plant with its own pollen (S1). Chucking implies a second parent.
- Breeding: a programme of selection over generations, not a single pollination.
Pollination is the transfer of pollen onto a female flower's stigmas; in cannabis it is usually by wind, or by hand when breeders pollinate chosen branches to make seed.Open-pollinated seed comes from a population left to cross freely among its own plants, without controlled pairs, which keeps a line's variation and type over generations.In cannabis growing, a plant (usually female) that develops both pistillate and staminate flowers or anthers; botanists call it intersex or monoecious expression.A pollen chucker is someone who crosses two popular plants, skips selection and testing, and sells or spreads the seed as a new line.Selfing is pollinating a plant with its own pollen, in cannabis usually by reversing part of a female to make pollen; it is the most intense form of inbreeding.S1 is seed from a plant pollinated with its own pollen; every S1 seed is female and a new genotype, not a copy of the parent.A cross is the offspring of mating two different plants, written female x male, as "A x B"; one cross starts a line but is not one.A breeder develops lines over generations with clear goals, large grow-outs, selection of both sexes, stability and herm testing, and honest lineage records.
