SPACE JILL
Breeding Better Cannabis - part 2
Written by: Subcool

I have been growing for some twenty-five years now, and I have started hundreds of different strains in my life. Recently I decided to start some Space Queen that I had stashed for many years. Vic High originally created this cross using his Romulan and Cinderella-99. I was never a huge fan of Romulan, although I liked the exotic flavor of Romberry.

This is what Vic had to say about the Space Queen cross.
??Space Queen was the only reason I invested in C99 in the first place. Ever since I heard the description of Soul's princess I knew her and Romulan would be the perfect match. Then prototype crosses between P75 and Romberry started pumping out the winners that have found keeper status in many select gardens. Each of these keepers, exhibit a blend of the C-99 and the Romulan characteristics. Space Queen is a Romulan/C-99 hybrid. Flavor and potency are sure things; both parents are known for their high potency and great highs. Lemon, pine, and pineapple all swirl in a pungent bouquet to tantalize your taste buds!! Vigor will be outstanding and you'll be able to cut back on the light intensity somewhat Flowering time will be comparable to Romberry, averaging eight weeks but depending on grower and grow environment. Yield will be above average, but she won't be a top production plant. I hope she puts a smile on a few faces.?

We started a ten pack of seeds just too finally; give this strain a run organically. We selected the best four males and best four females. I??m sure I will catch some heat from the larger scale breeders for starting with such low numbers, but it is the only pack I had to work with. Each plant was labeled and photographed each week to record progress. Resin was forming extremely early on the stalks and the undersides of the leaf surfaces. By week three of the flowering process (twelve hours of light-twelve hours of dark) each female had taken on a wonderful Pineapple-Lemon-Mango smell.

We selected the male which was the slowest to show sex, this theory is based upon ??breeding selection processes? spelled out in my last article. We are looking for the ??recessive drug traits?? in the male rather than ??hemp dominant traits??. The male we choose was the very last to show sex and he best met all of our other selection criteria. (The other males were passed along to other TGA members for testing.) Large tight stamen clusters on a selected male is also a good indication of quality, as you can see; our dude has nice tight clusters. You can also see ??resin blobs?? on his empty stamens. I have never before been able to see the ??resinous glue?? on an empty stamen, mainly because I have just recently upgraded my camera and I am now able to photograph down to one centimeter. This male was tested by ??out-crossing?? with a known ??true breeding IBL?? Orange Skunk, known as Orange Velvet. The off-spring was grown-out to determine if the proper characteristics would be passed on. The out-cross of Orange Velvet and Space Queen was created by MzJill, the strain is known as Jilly Bean. This hot new strain is winning over gardens everywhere; with a dank orange-mango smell and more resin than the original Orange Velvet mom. My favorite phenotype smells like a candy store! We now have a male that we know will pass along the proper taste, potency and in the case of Orange Velvet, added yield as well.

The female Space Queens were labeled as follows; they also took on nick names or trait descriptions to help us keep better documentation of each.
A. Smallest over-all with a funky semi-rotting smell.
B. The most resinous nicknamed Frosty-Queen.
C. Best internodal spacing, potency and largest buds.
D. Jolly Rancher
The females grew rapidly during vegetation period.
*MzJill picked the phenotype labeled C, as the best based on internodal spacing and over all look. As they started flowering, phenotype C still stood out as the best looking, based on size and overall growth.
*The smallest phenotype appeared to have the most resin, B renamed Frosty Queen is over the top with raised trichomes, forming all the way to leaf edge and tip. This is probably the most photogenic plant. You can see the raised trichomes and amazing coverage of resin.
*There is a red phenotype, labeled as D but renamed as Jolly Rancher. It is the strangest and the most unlike the other three. It has a hint of cherry and extremely red pistils that really stand out as the colas dry. My favorite of the four is A. It is less fruity than B and C and has the smell of Genius and Apollo-13. I say it smells like ??baby poo?? but that??s not right really. It smells of slightly rotten fruit, a slight pungency mixed with fruit and citrus. It was not a heavy yielder. The plant only yielded forty-eight grams on a five-foot bush with four heads, so she was culled. She has been passed along to SunyCheba for safe keeping.

MzJill was completely right about phenotype C. She just became a tremendous plant with large dripping colas that started plumping after day fifty of flowering. She smells a lot like C-99, she has a sweet smell that reminds me of Granny Smith Apples cooked in vanilla. She yielded more than any other plant with four mass heads that just look like showcase nugs. As Phenotype C started curing the nugs took on a candy-like smell with a hint of apples, lime-green in color with bright orange and red hues accented by brilliant resin production. In sunlight it looks like jewelry sparkling like diamonds.

At three weeks of curing the unique cherry smell of D or Jolly Rancher, seems to have faded and although the buzz is extreme, it doesn??t measure up to the other three and will be culled from the heard. Phenotype B known as Frosty Queen may be too small to keep for long term but for now she makes a great head stash with amazing cream colored kief. I still like the flavor of Phenotype A but she grows like a vine and is a bit hard to manage, so time will tell. Phenotype C will be in our garden for a long time and is used as our P1 mom for our Space Queen F2, aka, Space Jill. MzJill still keeps a jar of Space Queen, phenotype C, as head-stash. So now we have a proven male based on out-crossing with a known IBL (Orange Velvet) and we have a female of the Space Queen strain that would be a prize in any garden.

We grew out a good sized Space Queen C and placed her into flowering time, seven days prior to starting the male to assure a good amount of pistils to be pollinated. The male will start to show flowers at fourteen days and by twenty-one days the first stamen will open. We place the female in a room completely separate from our main growing area and place a fan in the room. Jill and I both like to use barely open male stamens to sprinkle grains onto each bud and try and capture the grains of pollen falling in the air. The plants spend a few days together under a 400 watt light with the fan gently blowing the pollen all over the female as each stamen opens. After three full days the female is then removed and rinsed repeatedly with water to de-activate the pollen and make any loose grains non-viable.

It takes a full forty-five to fifty days from this point (after pollination) for the seeds in this particular hybrid, to mature, every cross is different and some may take much longer to fully mature. We generally wait until we can actually see mature seeds protruding from the calyx. We pulled a test bud at sixty-five days flower and ran a germ test on one-hundred seeds and got a ninety-five percent germ rate after the seeds dried for two full weeks. The resulting cross was grown-out in test gardens. The cross took on the nickname Space Jill because MzJill was the one who knew which female was the best long before it had buds. The hybrid has quickly become a favorite because the first one-thousand seeds were given away as freebies. Usually free seeds are not primo, but in this case I had a few people tell me they liked the Space Jill more than the more expensive crosses.

We liked the attributes and stability of the Space Queen male, now known as Space Dude. He has been used in out-crosses with Apollo-13, creating the Vortex; Jacks Cleaner, creating Jack The Ripper and Sweet Tooth #3, creating Space Tooth. We continue to work with this line to improve upon other crosses or to bring a ??clone-only?? strain to seed form so that others may enjoy the dankness. We are now working on a UK Cheese X Space Dude (Space Queen male) cross, so that I may enjoy that famous strain without obtaining a clone myself. Space Dude is one of our ??work horse?? males, now we can use him to add flavor and resin along with potency to almost any hybrid cross.


Space Queen C our Momma