False seeds syndrome

[GrayZone]

EDIT
As this is, from what I've seen online, a rarity and it may turn you a bit paranoid as you might think you got dicks in your roses aka hermies, I wanted to leave a trace of it in the depths of www, in case anyone in the future will try to get an answer.

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Growing from clones, so I don't know was the mother started from regular or fem seeds.

It's week five of flowering and I noticed swollen single calyxes on the lower parts of plants, mostly right at the nodes(basically those that you see first in pre-flowering). I picked a couple and, after dismantling them, saw developing seeds within them. I've checked buds for any signs of nanners and there were none. Also, didn't see any of those within buds.

EDIT
It turns out to be an ovule, rather than a fertilized seed. It's not that hard to mistake them for a baby seed, so don't panic if you find them.

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As it's been more than a decade since my last grow, I don't recall exactly, but I think I saw that a couple of times; plants grown from fem seeds producing single hermie calyxes on the lower parts of the plant, at nodes. Those are true hermies, while the rest of the plant isn't affected(or at least it seems so for now), and no nanners are to be seen.
Has anyone had that?


These little fuckers are what I'm talking about...

 

[Creeperpark]

Growing from clones, so I don't know was the mother started from regular or fem seeds.

It's week five of flowering and I noticed swollen single calyxes on the lower parts of plants, mostly right at the nodes(basically those that you see first in pre-flowering). I picked a couple and, after dismantling them, saw developing seeds within them. I've checked buds for any signs of nanners and there were none. Also, didn't see any of those within buds.

As it's been more than a decade since my last grow, I don't recall exactly, but I think I saw that a couple of times; plants grown from fem seeds producing single hermie calyxes on the lower parts of the plant, at nodes. Those are true hermies, while the rest of the plant isn't affected(or at least it seems so for now), and no nanners are to be seen.
Has anyone had that?

For the last couple of days, they seemed to have a bit of a slowdown in fattening up, so I checked them and found those random, single-fertilized calyxes. Now I hope there weren't a couple of nanners (that I haven't noticed earlier)that managed to fertilize most of the buds, hence the apparent slowdown in development.
Truth be told, I can think of a thing or two that may have stressed them out and pushed them to produce a couple of hermie calyxes, along with the apparent slower growth, so not sure what to think...

What do y'all think?

Cannabis plants have a super efficient ability to survive in almost any condition. One way to know if it is female pollen or male pollen is to wait and germinate the new seeds. IF the new seeds produce all females then the pollen was from female. If the new seeds yield a male then the pollen was from reg seeds.

 

[GrayZone]

Ya, I know that. Wouldn't use those seeds, don't think it would be worth it. Did that once with some Mazar seeds that I got from a plant that was grown from fem seeds. Besides having a likelihood of ending up with even more hermies than the parent had, it would be also an F2 seed, me thinks.
I don't remember exactly how the vigor etc. of those F2s were compared to the parent, but I do remember pretty well that I ended up with plants that had so many hermies that I threw them away. Both resin and mass production are gone as soon as they focus on seed development, so IMO it's not worth the hassle.

Anyway, what is a bit concerning is the possibility of getting more of those, but in buds rather than only below the canopy. So I guess I wanted to hear did anyone else had something similar happening.

 

[GrayZone]

Plot twist;
After some digging, I found this

So it seems I was wrong saying there are developing seeds in those preflower calyxes. Looks like I've been digging out ovule out of those swollen preflower calyxes and was mistaking it for a developing seed. Frankly, it does look like a starter-kit mini seed which makes sense, they need to start from something. As there are no nanners seems I was simply wrong.

 

[GrayZone]

After dropping an email on the topic to Serious Seeds(as I'm growing Serious Kush), Simon wrote back on his experience on the matter.
It's interesting and might be useful in case you're panicking if you have found one of those things in your preflower calyxes.

Symon says:

"Hi there,

unfertilized calyxes swell up after the pistils change color, almost as if they were fertilized. This is best seen at the preflowers as they are separately located at the main stem and therefore well visible. They are the oldest flowers of the plant and because of that they swell up before the majority of the flowers which form buds. These flowers are all younger and stay fertile much longer. Inside each calyx you'll find the ovule in which the pre-seed resides. Two pistils grow out from each ovule.

If the pre-seed (or ovule) is fertilized it will swell up and forms a seed which grows inside the calyx.

If the pre-seed is not fertilized it usually wont swell up. But the calyx does, it swells up as if there is a seed inside. It looks like a tiny pear, but it is empty and there is no seed inside.

The pre-seeds are always present in sinsemilla weed but this is usually no problem at all. Everybody smokes the soft and usually green pre-seeds without realizing it.

Sometimes the pre-seeds harden up a bit, almost like a small seed. This seems to happen when sinsimilla weed is not harvested in time but the plants are left to continue to flower. We have seen that some plants do show their pre-seeds as a sort of small infertile seeds. They pre-seeds stay small, do not swell up but rather form a sort of small seed, which gets noticed because it is darker colored and not soft but more or less hard like a small seed.

People get all sorts of ideas when they notice pre-seeds. Ideas like: "these are small seeds so there must be free pollen around. There must be hermie's or male plants around. Neighbours have fertilized my plants by spreading pollen. etc"

But there is nothing to worry about. These are still pre-seeds and no seeds. There is no free pollen around else they would have swollen up to form real seeds. This means that there (probably) was no free pollen, no male plants and no hermies.

Although we have received less than 5 emails about this topic in our 30 years existence it may be so that some plants form darker and harder pre-seeds than other plants do. And it may be so that one plant grows these small dark and bit hard structures earlier than other plants. May be some plants show these darker, hard pre-seeds already towards the end of the normal flowering cycle. Although the first person still has to come forward to show us that they have found such plants.

It is like with all other characteristics of organisms: there are differences between individuals. And although it doesn't seem impossible that some plants could grow little dark unfertilized pre-seeds while still growing fresh flowers, we have not heard about the existence of such plants yet.

Personally we have never seen any problems with noticeable pre-seeds in weed from sinsimilla plants. Only when plants were left to flower longer than their normal flowering time (sativa plants to see if they would continue to grow more flowers), we have noticed those small dark pre-seeds. These pre-seeds were dark and a bit hard and you did notice them when you smoked that weed. The pre-seeds popped in a joint and gave this typical seed smell."

 

[revegeta666]

Seeing the first picture in this thread, I would think that is just a regular preflower that is swollen due to its age and genetics. The best way to make sure there's not a seed in it is to just press it between your fingers. If it pops it's a seed. When a calyx is pollinated, the shell of the seed is made first. Then it gets "filled" with the embryo. So even just a week or 10 days after pollination, there should be a relatively hard seed shell, if the preflower has been pollinated.