Seedling Robustness = Sex?

[AlchemySeeds]

Has anyone else noticed a tendency for your earliest, most robust seedlings to turn out to be males?

Never approached it scientifically but feel there might be a correlation.

 

[oldbootz]

males have more above ground vigor and females have more below ground vigor. sex is only determined between 3rd and 5th internode in most cases. the ratio of male to female is determined at the time of pollination/seed formation. some seed batches will give consistently more males than females and other seed batches will give the opposite result while most combinations will be at about 1:1. hormones in the plants decide what sex they will become. environment and supplements can affect those hormones. adding cytokinins in early seedling stage will encourage more females than males and the opposite is true of gibberelic acid. hope that helps a bit to clear things up.

 

[supermanlives]

in a few strains i run your theory is spot on . others not so much.

 

[señorsloth]

id say at the seedling level you can't judge anything, sprouts grow exponentially, meaning two seeds could crack at the same exact time in the same exact soil, in the same size cups, and tiny variations will cause them to differentiate in growth quite a bit, for instance if one seed makes a funny loop with it's tap root, or maybe the shell takes a bit longer to pop off, it may only be a day or two apart but can make a difference as it gets bigger, because they grow exponentially as they put out leaves, not to the point where they will be vastly different later on, but as seedlings one could be at 2 sets of leaves and one could be at 3 or 4 because of something very small, though later on they even out a bit.

males do grow faster and stretch more than females, if you have wild hemp in your area like we do here you will notice this very fast, you can have acres of cannabis growing unmolested, and natural, the females will be around 6-8 feet tall, and the males will tower over them by a few feet every year, this is so that they can spread pollen farther, by being more accessible to bees and the wind. in the wild each plant is only thinking about themselves, they want to make the most babies at the expense of the other males around it, this natural competition ensures that the most robust genetics get spread more than the inferior ones, to the betterment of future generations. looking back however, i would say that at the beginning of flowering, the males and females have the same basic amount of foliage, the males are just stretchier...you can tell males in your garden this way to some extent, the fastest growing ones generally turn out to be males. in the wild they die about august, while the females stay alive till frost hits, 6-8 weeks longer...they seem more expendable than the females and i suppose that would explain why they don't need as big a root system as females do.