Feminized Cannabis Seeds

How to Feminized Cannabis Seeds

If you maintain all of the below recommendations, you should have 60-70% females. If you want to achieve 70-100% female plants from seeds, read some more advanced tips:

How to produce more females from seed

What you need to know about cannabis is that the experience of the grower has so much to do with their female:male ratios when growing from seeds. You can give 5 people the same 10 seeds, and they will all have different results. Some growers will have 30% females, 70% females, 50% females and others 100% females.

How to get more females to grow from that pack of seeds you purchased.

What you need to know about cannabis is that the experience of the grower has so much to do with their female:male ratios when growing from seeds. You can give 5 people the same 10 seeds, and they will all have different results. Some growers will have 30% females, 70% females, 50% females and others 100% females. The sex is not exactly predetermined before the grower gets the seeds. It’s all about a few tips and tricks and most important of all, reducing stress on the plants, specifically right before the calyx’s begin to form.

So the idea of good growing, to prevent hermies and produce more fems, making sure your plants:

1. Room temperature does not fluctuate too much

2. Room humidity levels do not fluctuate too much

3. Soil moisture levels to not become over watered or overly dry.

4. You keep the nutrients feeding regulated, not spiking or depleting the amounts of nutrients throughout each day. An equal ratio N,K and P will have reasonable results obtaining female plants. Remember the Diabetic pump theory,

5. You keep your light schedule exact, and never allow light pollution (never allow, even for a second, any amount of light to contact your plants during it’s dark cycle)

6. Never use 24 hours of light for vegetation, 18 on / 6 off is suitable, but not optimal. Read below for more advanced techniques.

Use more Nitrogen; you get more females when you have a bit more Nitrogen and less Potassium. If your Potassium levels are higher, you will get more male plants. A bit more Nitrogen is better for the vegetation cycle anyways.hello

Make sure your humidity levels are high right from seed with a humidity dome. If our humidity levels are low, you will get more males. Also prevent your soil from drying, this will create more males.

Temperature does have a bit to do with the strain background. Unless your growing an exotic Thailand Sativa strain that loves the heat around 85 degrees, try to keep the temperatures lower. High heat creates stress on the majority of strains people grow, and make more males. Keep your room temperature as close to 70 degrees Fahrenheit as possible, and make sure it does not drop by more than 5 degrees when the lights are off, or you will create more males. Keeping the relative humidity of the room at 70% is optimal for females to form. Higher humidity’s over 80 and under 60 will create more males.

Do not top your plants or take clones before sex is shown, this will add stress and create more males.

Use a Metal Halide (MH) during vegetation and a High Pressure Sodium Bulb (HPS) for flowering. This will create more females. 

Before you change the light cycle from it’s vegetation to it’s flowering, be sure your plants are stress free. If you recently overfertilized, or treated the soil for mold or plant for pests, wait a few days for the plants to overcome that stress, then go into the flowering cycle, even if it throws your schedule off by a few days, it’s well worth it as you may get 20% more females simply by waiting the extra 3 days for them to recover from the stress.

It’s also best to vegetate under 14.5 hours of light for optimal female ratios. If this cannot be done, then use 16. And if you’re still in too much of a hurry, use 18, but never 24 hours of light or you will have too many males. You get more females using 14.5 hour of light during the vegetation cycle, slightly less using 16, slightly less at 18, but your chances dramatically decrease if you use 24 hour light. You could end up with 70% males, or 100% male plant, that means NO FEMALES AT ALL. It’s not worth the risk, especially if you’re growing higher end genetics.

Female and Feminized Seed

During the 1960′s and 1970′s some cannabis breeders took to experimenting with Colchicine. Colchicine, a powerful mutagen for both man and beast, stops cell duplication, while the cellcore duplication continues the same. The end result is a doubling or more of the chromosome set. This treatment can be beneficial to cannabis because it enforces many properties such as higher production of thc and resistance to disease. What also resulted, when gender chromosomes doubled, is that male or female chromosomes appear manifold, called Hermaphrodites.

What’s the plant to become? It becomes all at once. The result is called feminized or effeminate seed. Genetically, a cannabis plant is more or less predisposed to become male or female. This is regulated by 2 chromosomes everyone knows as the X and Y chromosomes. A plant with 2 XX chromosomes becomes female. A plant with an X and Y turns into a male. Plants have hormones that regulate it’s functioning, of which gender is one of those functions. The hormone balance is genetically determined, and partly influenced by environmental factors. An example is when plant roots get damaged. The roots will produce a substance that in turn slows down leaf growth. The result is male flowers. When discussing hormone balance you get FEMALE SEED: a female is a plant with XX or only female chromosomes.

When you have a seed with just X chromosomes

You are certain this seed will grow into a plant that is genetically female. To achieve the XX only plant: a female plant is forced by a hormone called Gibberellic Acid to produce male flowers, the pollen created contains only X chromosomes, when you offer this pollen to another female plant you can be absolutely certain to get seeds which are 100% XX. Once again this seed is called FEMALE SEED. Gibberellic Acid can be found in online. It takes years for an individual to achieve the proper plant hormone manipulation to get 100% female XX seed. Supplies therefore fluctuate and there are many different strains available worldwide.