We’ve been asking breeders a simple thing: how do you actually hunt?
Not the theory. The real process:
How many seeds they pop, what they’re chasing, how they tell a keeper from a pretender. We’re collecting those answers and handing them straight to you, one breeder at a time.
First up: Rocky of RockyMountainHigh719. Here’s how he hunts, in his own words.
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1. How many seeds do you pop for a hunt?
Depends entirely on the goal and whether he made the seeds himself. For something he’s serious about, he goes big and pops in waves, culling down over multiple rounds rather than crowning a winner off a single run. When he hunted his Zomps (fems), he popped ~75. With regs he pops even more to cover the males he’ll lose:
“I definitely pop different amounts for different goals… for any type of hunt, my goal is to hunt as many as possible…I try to pop more if they’re regs because obviously you’re going to get some of the males in there.”
The part worth noting: he doesn’t pick keepers off one run. Rocky will take the best 10 of 50, run those again, knock it to 3–5, and run those again before naming a keeper.
2. What are you hunting for?
Terp profile and effect are Rocky’s main focuses. Everything else is secondary. And he refuses to crown anything on looks or smell alone.
“I’m very strict, and I’ve always been, about not selecting a keeper till after I’ve smoked it….I look for terp profile, effect, and then after that, all those other things are just secondary.”
3. Hunting for hash — any advice?
Two things: a quick tactile test, and then just wash everything. The finger test on a lower bud tells him a lot before he ever washes:
“If you rub a lower bud and it’s very tacky and you take your fingers and you press them against each other and release and you see stringers, that’s a very, very good indicator…If it’s a really greasy profile, it’s probably not going to wash very high.”
And the mindset shift most people miss: stop chasing percentage. Pay attention to yields in respect to biomass: A 3% washer with double the biomass can out-yield a 5% washer. Rocky would rather grow a 2% washer with the profile he wants than a 5% that smokes like everything else.
4. Regs vs. fems — why one or the other?
If he’s making regular seeds, it has to be a reg hunt. Beyond that, he doesn’t play favorites — he chases lineage.
“I’m a lineage guy, always have been since day one…I’ve actually found more hermies in regular seeds than I ever have fems…If it’s a fem, let’s roll with it. If it’s a reg, let’s roll with it.”
5. Hunting for breeding vs. production — how’s it different?
Hunting females for a breeding project is basically the same as hunting for production — find something great with a trait you want to pass on. Males are the hard part:
“Males are a little bit trickier… you don’t really know what they’re going to put out until you use it.”
He’s had ~20 breeding projects die on the vine because a male just didn’t deliver. So he reads males by vigor, structure, smell (“good males smell like a female plant”), and whether they throw trichomes in flower.
6. General advice for anyone hunting?
- Run it more than once. Run-to-run variation is real; one bad run can bury a keeper. “I like to run things multiple times before I pick a keeper.”
- Pop extra for regs. You’re going to lose the males — plan for it.
- Let them show their sex. No forced early flips, no rush. He believes “maturity matters” and lets plants mature and declare themselves.
- Keeper counts are batch to batch. Same seed count gave him 15 potential keepers in one strain and 5 in another. Don’t force a quota.
That’s Rocky. More breeders coming. Same six questions, different answers. Reply and tell us who you want to hear from next.