Interesting.. But would that not yield F2 seeds then? If so can someone explain to me then how big a difference is there between F1 and F2? If i understand what i have read correctly, you will just receive bigger variations of the orginal parents with F2?
So what does that then mean? I can go the F2 root... but the process MIGHT take waaaay longer.. ??
I'm no expert so take what I say with a splash of salt, but from what I understand you are correct: inbreeding amongst the first generation of a hybrid strain from stable parents (F1) will produce 2nd generation seeds (F2) which will have a wider variety of the original parent plant characteristics than the first generation. The degree of variation will depend on how different the parent plants were from one another, and how stable the parent genetics were in the first place. This F2 variation is a good thing if you're trying to improve on the F1 plant in some way as it gives you a greater variety of plants from which to choose, but a bad thing if you're trying to sell a consistent quality of seed.
If your mission is to grow crops from a good example of a famous F1 strain then yes, the F2 route would take longer and in reality you wouldn't really be growing the named F1 strain, you'd be growing some other combination of the parent strain characteristics. To take a real world example, Nirvana Chrystal is an F1 hybrid of White Widow and Northern Light. If you were to buy Chrystal seeds, inbreed them and grow from the F2 seed, then in a sense you'd be growing a new cross of White Widow and Northern Light genetics, not the F1 hybrid strain sold by Nirvana. That said, it will be very similar and if selected from a large enough pool of F2 plants you may find something better than the F1 parent.
From what I can make out the seed industry works something like this: you start by crossing
Blue Horse with
Red Donkey to get
Purple Jackass #1. It smokes well and one of the parents featured in a good movie or song lyric, so you can sell this seed for loads of money and the offspring will be a fairly consistent shade of purple that roughly matches the pictures on your website. If you breed two of these first-generation Jackasses together though you'll get a variety of shades of purple from your F2 seed, with some red and some blue in there too. This is fine if you weren't quite happy with the original F1 shade of purple and you're looking for a plant with a little more blue in it to make clones, but you can't use F2 seed to grow consistent crops and you can't sell it for decent money as the buyer doesn't know what shade of purple he's getting. You'll have to invent a crap name like
Purpleish Horseybeast and sell it at 4.99 for 10 seeds.
If however you select some F2 offspring that have exactly the shade of purple you want and breed them together (or with one of their parents) and then select from amongst the 3rd generation offspring and breed again, and repeat the process for eleven more generations, you will eventually have
Dakne's Purple Jackass #14, a stable hybrid strain which is consistently the perfect shade of purple. Inbreeding amongst these stable Jackasses will produce fairly consistent seeds so you can sell it at a good price, so long as the parents are still in fashion. More than that though you can now breed your stable
Purple Jackass #14 with
Evil Zebra to produce a new horsey-themed F1 strain with lovely purple stripes and a fairly consistent portion of evil in every seed. Goldmine! Now to come up with a good name...
