
Kaliman Seeds & Cheese #1: Spontaneous Sexual Reversal

By Rockster
Derived solely from the 1989 UK Exodus cheese clone and is not a femmed S1 but is in a normal, healthy, male/ female cannabis population and so is not hybridised but 100% pure unadulterated Exodus genetics in seed form.
Hi everybody at Treating Yourself,
My name is Rockster and this is an article about Kaliman Seeds and Cheese#1, a total- ly unique strain and for rather special rea- sons as it’s derived solely from the 1989 UK Exodus cheese clone and is not a femmed S1 but is in a normal, healthy, male/ female cannabis population and so is not hybridised but 100% pure unadulterated Exodus genet- ics in seed form which when grown out, the chemotype/resin profile of the original
Exodus mother is present in all phenotypes and cannot be picked out in blind taste tests. a seemingly impossible thing many knowledgeable growers would think, don’t you think?
It does sound impossible doesn’t
it? How on earth can you end
up with seeds from a clone mother,
in a normal cannabis population and
it has the same taste and high as the clone?
I’ll tell you, it was all due to a ‘ spontaneous sexual reversal’ of 2 clones out of a tray of 20 Exodus cheese that were put into flower. Yes, that is what I said, 20 normal cheese clones that when flipped to 12/12, 18 were perfect girls and 2 most certainly were boys, no, not her- maphrodites, perfectly normal males I tell’s ya! Now, I had been working with this mother plant, getting on for 3 years in a good environment and started by crossing the Exodus with a Sensi Seeds 2008 male Skunk#1 and back
crossed 3 times, cubed, a BX3.0, called Rocksters Cheese and had 1 in 4 pheno’s that were really cheese like but had a citrus rather than fruity component that goes with the cheese clone but has the full ‘ mouth coating effect’, it’s incredibly flavoursome and has a really nice high and was personally very happy with the result of this 4 generations of crosses.

I started to do those crosses
after trying several cheese strains out there and couldn’t find anything to make me as happy as with the original
clone and so set about, starting
with Rocksters Cheese as a project and
also did experimental crosses with original
Haze, some landrace genetics, Afghan, Nepalese, Lebanese, and then tried to
use Silver ThioSulphate (STS) and Colloidal Silver to reverse the Exodus clone and I tried and failed 3 times. It always produced full male flower structures but they did not shed pollen, were sterile. It is supposed to be reversible in order to obtain S1 femmed beans but my modest attempts didn’t succeed and so continued to work with experimental crosses and it was all very interesting for me, learning in real time, documenting with many pic- tures and also inviting friends for their input, as I had a goal, to make a cheese strain as much like the original if possible as it’s ok for those that own an Exodus mother, an ‘elite clone’ is what our American cousins might call it? Well, wouldn’t it be nice if you could get it in a reliable seed form?
Well, after failing to reverse her properly I continued with making crosses and prepared a tray of 20 Exodus clones, same environment as usual, totally dialled in, and put 20 young plants into flower for future pollination with 5 lots of pollen from various strains.
I asked knowledgeable breeders on the forum if they
had ever heard of or experienced
such a thing and if so what was the genetic mechanism that lay behind
this (cue X- files intro!) seeming freak of nature? Well I was met
with initial strong scepticism and rightly so as it does seem totally far out and was closely grilled, asked to go over
everything that had happened in
my growroom in the last 12 months
and the only thing I could think of was the fact as I had been using STS chems in the past, the
clone mother might have been sprayed with a
tiny tiny dose of STS, just a hint from an overspray and I say might
and anyway, how could that really effect anything, I thought
at the time? But one Breedbay member reported the same thing happened to him in one of his grows although he didn’t subsequently use the pollen like I did.
So not finding any satisfactory answers myself, Googled ‘spontaneous sexual reversal’ and got information that it does indeed occur in both plants and animals but I could- n’t find anything cannabis specific and which was rather frustrating as this had happened and been seen with my own eyes and I’m no newb, been growing well over 3 decades, made my first seeds in 1972 as a teenager and so I wanted to find out. badly! I also contacted a univer-
sity based geneticist who posts incredibly good lectures on Youtube but he couldn’t enter into discussions, he was US based, couldn’t answer me really I felt because of the subject matter? So if there is anybody out there reading this that could shed any light on this total female to total male metamorphosis please contact the writer as I’d love to learn what has actually occurred at the genetic level?
So eventually the harvest is dried but before a cure take samples of all pheno’s and got thoroughly down to testing with my friends and we soon discovered that every pheno had the full taste of the original mother, cheese code cracked! It was a eureka moment, I still couldn’t quite believe my own senses but my friends clinched it for me, back slaps and high fives all around, I’d done it, I really had done it.
I have however after finishing this article found perhaps some pertinent information in Hemp Husbandry by Robert A Nelson in relation to sexual expression in cannabis and I quote:

4.9 ~ Sexual Expression
The sexual expression of cannabis is determined by its genetic makeup, and by its metabolic temper, which is regulated by the male enzyme andrase and the female enzyme gynase. Environmental conditions (light, nutri- ents, soil and water) may suppress the formation of the dominant enzyme, and allow the opposite sex to express itself partially (hermaphroditism) or completely (sex reversal). (71, 72)
Whether this is applicable to a female clone I’m not sure but the Exodus original has been about for 23 years and passed through many hands and different environments and been serial cloned and so has been subject to a huge amount of environmental stress and along with natural mutations and accumulated errors in cell replication, as let’s face it, cannabis lives for but a few months in nature and so am thinking this extreme age of the clone might have had something to do with causing this total sexual reversal to occur?
So the 2 totally male looking
plants had been moved away from the 18 girls and continued
to mature and start
to shed pollen and
so I collected as much as possible,
cleaned and stored it and
then dusted several Exodus clones and
upon maturity collected several thousand nice, mature, healthy looking seeds and which
at the time I assumed would be S1 femmed seed, I mean, wouldn’t you?
So I grew out for the first time
what I ended up calling Cheese#1 and soon got the surprise of
seeing a normal male/female population emerge in the grow room! Curiouser and
curiouser? So I’m looking
at this group of plants and see that there are about
4-5 phenotypes, a short squat, more indica
type which finished first by far in
8 weeks and taller more sativa
like girls which took up to
11 weeks but with at least 4 different bud types between them a
lot of variation compared to most regular hybrid strains and just mention
that as this seemingly
great variety is all from 1 single
clone? The Exodus clone takes me 9-9 ½ weeks
to fully mature but Cheese#1
is 8-11 weeks with
8 weekers being the rarer types.
So as the plants mature I’m not thinking they are too cheesy in the smell department, not compared to my mem- ories of the Exodus but I decide to take an early taster and take a small bud to dry and when it’s ready I try it and am soon tasting the classic taste of the original mum, hang on there, you sure, I ask myself and in the interest of, ahem, cannabis research, sparked another and which I’m pleased to report seemed even better, ha ha! So with the zeal of a mad monk harvested all the plants when ready and had also done an open pollination on 8 females with 6 males. I have no fear of pollinating virgin plants I need for bud as I grow the males elsewhere and remove the plants intend- ed for pollination and pollinate 1 at a time, leave for an hour, wash down thoroughly, dry and then return to growroom.
I often do a selective pollination by bagging the top of the plant when hitting them with love dust and so have a nice top cola for evaluation purposes. So eventually the harvest is dried but before a cure take samples of all pheno’s and got thoroughly down to testing with my friends and we soon discovered that every pheno had the full taste of the original mother, cheese code cracked! It was a eureka moment, I still couldn’t quite believe my own senses but my friends clinched it for me, back slaps and high fives all around, I’d done it, I really had done it. I hadn’t bred this gem but I’ll gladly take the credit for having made good use of that reversal ! We did loads of blind taste tests and couldn’t tell things from the original although there are subtle differences between pheno’s but can only be picked up by those working with or who are very familiar with the cheese. So with the realisation I had what I had, set about having it extensively independently tested and so sent off 10 packets of 10 seeds of Cheese#1 which I pro- visionally called Exodus#1.
Off to Breedbay for testing by others and had particular- ly asked for those with experience of the cheese to be test growers and was very pleased with the results and had not one person say it did anything else than what it says on the tin, namely, it was just like the cheese in all departments and so with independent confirmation and since then dozens more happy Cheese#1 growers as I continued to give out free seeds on various forums and just asked for honest feedback and which I got and all very positive but on a particular forum , I was continually getting sniped at by a sceptic or 2 , like drunks shouting at the back of a show, not really making sense as they disbelieved me vehemently even after being told they don’t have to take my word for the fact this reversal occurred as loads of grow- ers had done online journals, dozens of people and all reported it was just like the original and they hadn’t even tried it and so were arguing from a point of ignorance and incredulity and very rudely too I might add and which I sorely took the mick out of but in the end contacted the main fellow and offered to sort out things to his satisfac- tion but he declined, oh well, I did try by offering an olive branch and why would I even bring up a seemingly diffi- cult claim to prove as I have the genetics, Cheese#1 flies purely on her own merits, no strange story of origin need- ed, heck, if I wanted to get whack about it I’d have said my grow got hit by a UFO’s space lazer which first bounced off David Icke’s sunglasses and you know what, lots of people would have found that a lot more credible, ha ha!
So that got me to thinking, rather than others anecdotal evidence, how to help substantiate my claim scientifically as I’m all for the scientific method , am a great science buff and so thought how about getting both the original clone and my Cheese#1 tested side by side using gas chromatog- raphy techniques in a laboratory? Well it so happens I have a friend in Prague who has access to a working lab with just such a piece of room sized equipment and I spent several pleasant days seeing some of this beautiful city and also visited a cannabis medical collective who were doing great work with oil extracts, taking various strains and extracting desired portions and combining extracts from other strains and were very interested in getting high cbd strains to work with, it was all really fascinating and I donated half a dozen packs of seeds and if they like what they find and think my Cheese#1 useful will add a moth- er to their quite extensive clone room, which would be personally very satisfying for me. I should imagine by the time of publication of this article I’ll have the results as I don’t just yet but it will be very interesting to see the read- out which will show the primary cannabinoids and also the terpenes, it’s the terpenes I’m almost more interested in for comparison purposes but hey, I’ll just have to be patient as this is a bit of extra-curricular work being done by my contact that might take a long time before a work- ing slot can be found for it, but when I get the results I’ll put them up in a blog at Attitude Seedbank for all to see.
So after all the testing by growers and the lab results in the
pipeline I decided to enter a Cannabis
cup and entered some
Cheese#1 bud grown
by a friend known online as Rizladon,
as once I knew 100% I had ‘The Cheese’ and
everybody liked it decided to get this strain
‘out there’ to the folk that would like
to grow cheese but
don’t have access to the clone but
I had to stop growing
locally myself and arrange grow
space abroad in a country with
a more sensible take on Cannabis
and so immediately looked at Spain and the Canary
Islands and where very
fortunately I have friends and relatives living and so entered the 11th
Canarian Cannabis Cup just recently in the Copa Pro or Pro Cup and which was an all comers category which had more entrants than all the other entries combined and I’m very pleased to report I got a respectable 3rd place and a lovely trophy which is a mounted 10 inch high Perspex trichome! The event was held on the 23rd July at the north end of the island of Tenerife, as the Canary islands are an archipelago, a volcanic chain of many islands, and we went to the north of Tenerife in the mountainous area at over 1000m elevation. When we arrived we discovered the place enveloped in really chilly cloud whilst being dressed for a tropical summer as it was 30c+ back in the south where my friend, Archipelago ( who lives on an adjacent island ) and I had our hotel as he had come over on the island hopping ferry.
It was great to win a trophy of course but also really nice just to attend and there were nearly 500 people on the day who enjoyed a huge barbeque and one of the princi- pal organisers, Claudia, made sure everything ran really smoothly and I got a nice heart felt hug from her when my name was announced and it was a sweet moment when all the winning entrants went up for a video and picture call where we grinned at each other like Cheshire cats and pointed out each others trophy’s and asked who had won what in Spanish and English, heck, didn’t need words, we were all just very happy.
I had brought 28 packets of seeds to hand out and some went in the raffle and I had to pull a number out of a hat, all the sponsors did too and many nice prizes were hand- ed out, lights, propagators and other kit and all with a good bunch of various seeds and all with good music pumping away, lots of smiling if cold faces as it was real- ly freezing! My teeth were chattering at one point but once I heard I had won felt plenty warm, ha ha! Unfortunately we had to leave about an hour after the prizes had been awarded, our driver had to split a bit sharpish and I couldn’t say goodbye properly to Claudia to thank her for putting on such a great show and mak- ing me feel so welcome so if you are reading this Claudia, thankyou so much!
And upon our return to the hotel after a shave and a shower had a really nice meal with my good mucker Archipelago and chilled on the balcony and reflected upon the day and although it was a 3rd prize ( my dad used to teach me no second place winner as a kid, ha ha!) I thought I had done rather well that day.
We sparked some smokes made with the winning Hashish entrant, kindly gifted by Xavier who wanted my email addy so we could get in touch and maybe exchange genetics, so cheers Xavier, let’s do that and yes, thankyou so much for that excellent hash, twas a lovely end to the day smoking the stuff of assassins.
Peace