Just threw out my best plant - fuc**** male !

[MobbDeep]

:kitty:

To further my chances of getting females..I use the banana method,then veg under a ultra blue 6500k t5 system..then flower under the hps..

from what ive read,more blue light,higher nitrogen,lower temps,and shorter light cycles make more female plants..also,the more stress the plant has,the higher chances it will become male or hermie..i got alot of new strains coming in..and ill use the banana method with them too..so far,it HAS worked for me..100% females..but that was jsut maybe my luck.

 

[DrunkenMessiah]

I've read up on the banana method and as mad as it sounds I believe it.

It is similar to many practices of exposing unpopped seeds to things like ethelyne gas or estrogen in order to boost female predisposition.

But that is exactly what it is, a predisposition! Even the best femminized seeds will not necessarily produce 100% female. Creating the right conditions to encourage female development is vital to anyone growing from seed, femminized or not!

MobbDeep

All the stuff you list-off is spot-on. However I would hesitate to describe 'more nitrogen' as something that will make girls. It isn't just high nitrogen, its the ratio of nitrogen to the other stuff in your soil. Nitrogen and potassium are the two critical elements for swaying sex. If you want more girls, run about 3 times as much nitrogen as potassium. If you want males, run closer to a 1:1 ratio of N and K

On top of that, I've always thought the plants' physical structure also makes a difference. Tall spindly plants (especially ones that are constantly blown around by a fan) seem to 'know' that they are well-suited for spreading pollen around. Likewise, plants which are kept super-short with tons of bud locations seem to 'know' that they are better suited to producing flowers to get pollinated.

The only thing that is for sure is that there is no silver-bullet solution for getting ladies from seed. I think the sooner this is embraced the better. It takes a combination of things to get 100% girls.

But the good news is that combination doesn't always have to be the same. You could use the banana method, keep low stress and then veg under 6500K light and get all girls. Or you could do like Lady Largely: Don't try to femminize the seeds at all and then just use cytokinin and go apeshit keeping the environment just right and you will get all girls.

You don't have to completely push the boundaries to get all girls from mixed seed. Just do the best you can to convince the plants that they are ladies and, most of the time, ladies they will be!

Good luck to you all and happy gardening!

-DM

 

[jonkanoo]

.

 

[DrunkenMessiah]

Yes but see, you're wrong

Comparing the sexual development of asexual plants like tomatos and pumpkins with single-sex plants like cannabis is an intellectual waste of time. The two are so far-removed from eachother that any comparison in the context of this thread is moot.

Cannabis has no X and Y. X and Y are a bit of a misnomer; they aren't even different gene sets. In science, they should be the same letter: X and x. However, because the 'Y' gene is so important, and because it looks a bit like the letter 'y' when you look at it under a microscope, the 'incorrect' nomenclature has stuck. X and Y are part of the same set with two possible outcomes: XX and Xy. The Y gene is not a gene at all, just an irregular expression of the normal X gene. A mutation that occurred millions, if not a billion years ago, which allowed for severe differentiation between animal sexes.

But that is neither here nor there.

Even though your link is broken I am aware of the technique to determine the sex at any stage of the plant. This technique simply shows you what sex the plant would 'choose' if you where to hit the switch and go to flower right there and then. You could run that test on a plant very early in its life and have it come back 'male'. You could run that same test on the same plant much later on, near flower, only to find that it now comes up 'female'. You must be misunderstanding me at a basic level

I don't think that plants are born with no sexual orientation. They are indeed born either 'male' or 'female'. What I am saying is that the sexual coding the plant is 'born' with is not necessarily the one it will express come flower!

There are all kinds of things that a gardener can do to deal with plants that where 'born male'. I would go so far as to say that the conditions that the plant veges in, things under control of the gardener, have much more influence over what sex gets expressed in the end. In my experience, the only genetic predisposition that can truly hose a gardener into being stuck with a male is:

A/A B1/b1 B2/b2

This is a strong male and they tend to come out male no matter what you do to them. However the odds of having one of these, even without using feminization techniques, are very small. Out of a group of 30 mixed seeds one of them might carry the genetic code for a strong male, they are very uncommon.

The rest of the time what sex seed-grown plants end up expressing is very much under the control of the gardener. To suggest otherwise is just plain wrong.

 

[ScrubNinja]

Fuckin' awesome posts DM, as always. Please hang in the micro section more!

I don't understand a lot of the science stuff but I try. In the colloidal silver/fem seed threads, a common issue seems to be that the female will put out male flowers, but they often (apparently) have little to no actual pollen inside the flowers. Could this be the results of having a female that is just too true to go all the way with the maleness needed to make the pollen? I sure hope you understand what I mean and I also hope that isn't exactly what you've explained already, lol.

Basically, I was hoping one day to stress test a bunch of seedlings with light poisoning, and use that to establish a true female/s, and use the true female to "self" some fem seed. I'm thinking of using the seed in outdoor situations where one cannot influence them with lights and things of that nature.

Hope things are well DM, I will get one of those OBBTs together one of these days! Your lengthy explanations weren't in vain.

 

[fatigues]

Fuckin' awesome posts DM, as always. Please hang in the micro section more!

No. NO!! God NO!!! DM needs to go away and not post here ever again!! I clicked on his OBBT link in his sig and an hour of my life has already gone >>poof<< before you could say "mycelium network".

At this rate, I'll spend the rest of the next four hours or so reading every damn post in the OBBT thread as my carefully and methodically laid out low pressure Aero/DWC plans will be overtaken by bubble baths and Mycorrhizae fungus...

Don't you understand? My SO will go looking for sharp knives once the smell of bat guano in boiling water steeps throughout the house. I'm doomed. DOOMED I tell you!

(OBBT sounds very cool DM. It's sucking me in against my will! Curse you *shakes fist*)

 

[ScrubNinja]

My SO will go looking for sharp knives once the smell of bat guano in boiling water steeps throughout the house.

Hehe, I actually made my first aerated tea last week and I was worried about smell. It smelt *nice*! Like molasses flavoured air freshener. I've never smelt guano though, I'd imagine it pongs.

 

[DrunkenMessiah]

Fuckin' awesome posts DM, as always. Please hang in the micro section more!

I don't understand a lot of the science stuff but I try. In the colloidal silver/fem seed threads, a common issue seems to be that the female will put out male flowers, but they often (apparently) have little to no actual pollen inside the flowers. Could this be the results of having a female that is just too true to go all the way with the maleness needed to make the pollen?

Heh, no, not really.

What is happening there is an inherent issue with the technique you are using to get feminized seeds. In fact, all methods of femming at polination as far as I know suffer from this flaw. (on the other hand, I beleive seed-soaking techniques escape this issue but they don't work as reliably in general) Making fem seeds always involves turning a female plant into a temporary hermaphrodite. This produces supposedly "female" pollen, but that is impossible. Time for more SCIENCE

Don't know if you bothered to read my rant against jonkanoo, but in one of the posts I mentioned this:

On top of that you have a separate set of genes for a the male sterility series. You can have totally sterile male, semisterile male, restored fertile male or effective female. This is all controlled by another three pairs of genes; I, R1 and R2.

See, pollen, by its very makeup, can't carry female coding. The switches just aren't there to be flipped. So what happens when a female sprouts male flowers? You get pollen that carries a set of genes from the Male Sterility Series.

The pollen usually carries code for a totally sterile male, but semi-steriles sometimes sneak in. When this sterile male code hits a female ovum the result is a mix of sex genes where the male parts are so weak that they hardly ever get expressed. However, those male parts are still there, and so seeds that are feminized this way will go hermie from time to time.

Because the pollen carried sterile male genes the male flower that form, as you describe, do not always carry pollen. Fully sterile male genetic code is enough to signal male flowers to be male, but because of its complete sterility no pollen can form out of them.

Yea, I know, makes my head hurt too!

This just goes to show how compliacated sexing in cannabis is, it cannot be simplified or taken for granted. Happily, this massive complexity gives the gardener many many opportunites to intervene and sway the population in a direction that he desires. How strong that influences is limited only by the gardener's knowlege and techniques!

It is because of this flexibility, ScrubNinja, that your dream of fem seeds that would fully withstand the effects of light-poisioning will never come true. Even plants carrying the greatest ratio of female genes possible still have enough male in there to express some form of hermaphordism when you piss them off.

Verry happy to be over here in the micro forums. I don't have anything like as much experience with micro grows as LadyLargely does, but I'll lend a hand where I can. I could definitely see the simplicity and compact nature of the OBBTs appealing to the folks around here. Hopefully the good Lady L gets some fatass nugs going on in her thread so as to pique attention in them even more!

Gotta say though, this forum is jumping, very active indeed!

No. NO!! God NO!!! DM needs to go away and not post here ever again!! I clicked on his OBBT link in his sig and an hour of my life has already gone >>poof<< before you could say "mycelium network".

At this rate, I'll spend the rest of the next four hours or so reading every damn post in the OBBT thread as my carefully and methodically laid out low pressure Aero/DWC plans will be overtaken by bubble baths and Mycorrhizae fungus...

Don't you understand? My SO will go looking for sharp knives once the smell of bat guano in boiling water steeps throughout the house. I'm doomed. DOOMED I tell you!

(OBBT sounds very cool DM. It's sucking me in against my will! Curse you *shakes fist*)

Hahaha! It is a very intreaguing concept is it not? You get invited in by the apparant simplicity, only for the maddening complexity of the living machine that lays beneith to suck you in forever! I'm supposedly the foremost expert on OBBTs and not even I have the foggiest idea how they work! All I know is that they do.

As for smelly teas, I think you overestimate the issue. Despite the name 'tea' they never have to be heated! The smell just ranges through various stages of earthy and organic. You have to have some manner of filtration in place to deal with your fat, sticky, stinky girls anyway. The tea pales in comparison with some good-ole skunk#1.

If you like a low-maintinence grow style then do not hesitate to get sucked into our little world! The OBBTs are a real pain-in-the-ass to knock together, especially when you are inexperienced, but just browse through Lady L's threads to see how easy they are to maintain once running. She's more than 30 days into her grow now and all she has done is added de-chlorinated tap water to the tubs... twice.

In comparison a low-pressure DWC (sorry mate, there really is no such thing as low-pressure aero. Aero needs ass) is very easy to build ant set up, its running the damn things that is a pain. Ph meters and TDS measurements and what have you. I prefer to just skip it all and thats what OBBTs let me do!

Good luck to all and happy gardening!

-DM

 

[ScrubNinja]

This is so interesting, damn. Okay so I think this is related: I have a few hundred regular old style seeds (woops I nearly said male and female seed) that I made myself from seemingly good parent plants. When they sprout, one elephant ear (cotyledon?) points way up, and the other points more downwards. They stay like that for a few days until the cots get really big but no growth tip ever appears. Even after a week or two they were all just elephant ears with a hollow growth tip. I've tried the same seed again in a different cab with different lights and same thing again! Other seeds grow normal tips fine. Does this sound like a sterility issue to you?

If so, if I planted all the seeds (they're only about 30% viable at this stage so let's say I got 100 actually sprout), is there a chance any normal growth plants could appear? I'm guessing "no" if I understand your posts correctly.

Thanks for any info or even opinions.

 

[jonkanoo]

.

 

[Jebus11]

It makes sense.

Especially if you think about crocodiles, their eggs sexing is temperature dependent, meaning depending on the temperature more will be male or more will be female.

They are way more complex beings then a cannabis plant. I believe females can be influenced by environmental factors.

 

[LadyLargely]

Heh, don't let that ole blow-hard DM get you down. Once you wind him up he is hard to stop.

The annoying thing is, he usually is right. He may have given up the ganjas but he is a horticultural scientist in training (which is much better for knowing about this sortof shit than all the supposed 'biologists' I see running around here). Plus he usually sees through issues to find that they are, as usual, a compromise. This situation is no different! Cannabis is indeed born either male or femele and he acknowledges that, but he knows like I do that things don't end there.

If you want some hard evidence of his hot-air then lurk around in my OBBT grow show, or the thread I've got running over here in the micro forums. I'm going 5 out of 5 females from totally random, completely unrelated mixed seed.

ScrubNinja

Not sure if your issue is a genetic (or at least sexual) one. I've seen plants pull this sort of horseshit before. I would definitely recommend that you scoot over to my grow show and look for my post about seed surgery. The trick with stubborn plants like yours is to get the new growth tip and first set of serrated leaves to appear before the sprout ever sees the light of day. Check it out, I think there is hope for you nice mutt seeds.

 

[BlackWidow]

fuck it ! another male ! 90% sure
i am gonna keep him for a few more days to be 100% sure.. i can't believe this
i am left with 4 plants that havn't shown sex yet
god help me.

 

[Alienate420]

Heheh...I started 10 seeds, 5 of two new different strains, only one of each strain germed and both ended up being male. Wasted cloning space on both of those boys too.

 

[BlackWidow]

thing that pisses me off the most is that the males are always the healthiest plants ]=
two of the males i found are perfect ! tight and short really good plants \\=

 

[ScrubNinja]

Thank you LL. I'm up to page 5 of your thread and I've been reading a long time now! I keep going back and starting again to make sure I intake it all, it's just that chock full of info. Will skip ahead today

Black Widow, have you considered doing the things that have been discussed here? (influencing the sex manually). Good luck.

 

[Hella THC]

there is no way to influence a plant from seed to become male or female!!

Okay, I have to weigh in on this one. That comment just drove me silly...

You ABSOLUTELY can influence sex. ABSOLUTELY! Perhaps you're confusing "influencing" and "forcing"... You cannot FORCE a plant to be male or female from seed, but you sure as hell can and should influence your plants.