Praise for the intersex

[Ralph W. Llama]

Back in the day, I used fluoro and low watt hps to get going indoors. Under this low light, the hermaphroditism was abundant, especially with the Elvis bagseed plants I was growing at the time.

I remembered the HT Soma rodelization article about using bananas and intersex pollen to get female seeds. So I chucked pretty extensively with the better plants and got great results very often.

Fast forward to using better led lights and I haven’t seen a nana or male flower on a female plant in years. Is poor lighting a similar stress as sts?

Regardless. the results speak for themselves and I am happy to have embraced the intersex plants for their strengths. Are we miss something?

 

[goingrey]

Is poor lighting a similar stress as sts?

No, not really.

Exposure to STS is a kind of stress that will not happen in the garden by accident. Light stress on the other hand is something all gardeners will have to deal with every now and then. Using plants that express intersex traits from light stress in breeding is really setting yourself up for trouble down the road. But this is true even if you reverse that plant with STS, well and even if you use it as a female with some regular male pollen. If it's just you you're setting up for trouble then that is of course fine, but if the seeds are for sale that might lead to some really unhappy customers.

 

[Ralph W. Llama]

No troubles for me, even with multiple generations and crosses. I used the pollen, got amazing plants, with some intersex expressions, but the effects and flavors were/are worth it. I was questioning the conventional wisdom of zero tolerance and whether we might get similar S1/fem results without chemicals. If I was ever to sell, there would be much more extensive selection and testing than popping a few beans at a time in a tiny tent as I do now.

 

[PolyChucker]

I have blurple LEDs in the closet and last winter I had 6 pretty cool plants that turned all sorts of colors and had interesting smells and almost all had intersex qualities. This was during the depth of winter and the cold was enough stress to cause this. I ran some clones of my favorites from this group recently and nothing - much less color and no nanners or balls.

somehow many great strains are intersex adjacent so the “kill em all” advice seems misguided.