Feminized seeds, HOW TO???

Two methods.
!. pollinate a female with a hermaphrodite.
2. Messing around with gibberellic acid.
The second gives a higher ratio of females.

 

I think you need a lot of experience and time to do this yourself.

I have heard of a variety of seemingly scientific as well as off-the-wall ideas how to achieve this. Usually it involves inducing a female to grow some male balls and then using that pollen, which actually is supposed to be female pollen at that point since it came from a female plant, and then cross-fertilize the female buds of that same plant. A hormone called gibberellic acid is considered among the most reliable inducers, though people claim ordinary aspirin can do it, too.

I've read about it, but at this point I'm way over my head. My advice: do what I do and just buy 'em feminized, every seedbank has them.

 

I don't know that there is a "hermie gene." Also don't know about certain females being resistant to turning hermie. Could be.

I think what someone else may have meant about the gene pool is your own gene pool, not releasing seeds out into the big wide world. If you cross a plant with itself, especially if you do that again with its offspring and so on, your genetics will become too inbred.

I also am unclear on what difference, if any, there is between hormone-induced male buds and hermie-from-stress male buds. Maybe nothing, or maybe stress-induced hermies are actually male. I'm offering what I can but I'm outta my league at this point.

 

Cloning and self-pollinating are not the same thing.

In fact, cloning in the sense of MJ propogation is not the same as Dolly the sheep and such. "Cloning" MJ really is taking a cutting and growing it out as a full plant. Many plants are genetically designed to be able to do that as a survival mechanism -- it is essentially the same plant as the mother (a piece of her, anyway), that keeps things going. True cloning involves manipulating DNA in a single cell under a microscope, and in spite of all the stuff in the news it's still highly experimental.

Self-pollinating is making the plant fertilize itself to create a new genetic generation, but using only the mother's own genetics for the input that normally would come from a mother and a father. Closest human analogy would be fathering a baby with your sister. OK, it's not gross when plants do it. The point is that living organisms fare better with diversity in the gene pool, and inbreeding is the opposite of that diversity -- more susceptible to diseases, more likely to be sterile, and so on.

 

FEMINIZE THE SEED?

It is at this point that you may wish to create feminized seed. These F1 hybrids will be used for planting in gardens, rather than for breeding. With feminized seeds, the grower knows that every plant is female because the seeds were produced using pollen from male flowers that were induced to grow on female plants. None of the pollen contains male genetics so they grow only into female plants.
There are a number of ways to create feminized seed. These include using chemicals such as aspirin and hormones such as gibberellic acid.It is easier to breed females to females using chemically-induced or stress-induced male flowers that produce pollen on female plants (forced hermaphrodites). However, plants that are induced to produce male flowers may have a slightly higher proclivity toward hermaphroditism than the general population. Using them for breeding may be inadvertently selecting for hermaphroditism.
After five or six generations, some of the plants might have more of a tendency towards hermaphroditism. There is little chance that plants grown from first-generation feminized seed will become hermaphroditic, so they are ideal for using in the garden. As the two lines were bred to themselves, the plants lost some of their vitality or vigor. This results from the genetic makeup becoming more homogeneous as siblings are bred to each other or progeny are backcrossed to parents. When the two lines are crossed, they produce a hybrid that will exhibit hybrid vigor. Once a desirable hybrid is created, it is possible to take cuttings from it and its clone progeny repeatedly without loss of vigor.

 

The way to make feminized seeds is to first stress a bunch of plants by messing with the light schedule, your trying to force the hermies to show themselves. Once you have found 2 different plants(plants from the same gene pool will have the tendency to give deformed and mutant plants) that do not have the trait to grow hermie.

You then get some gibberillic acid (extremely hard to obtain ive heard) and use it on one the female buds to force it to grow male flowers, pollinate the other female with this pollen and that is how good feminized seeds are made.

Using plants that has the hermie trait will give you more problems then you want, your better off using other breeding methods to make your seeds.

 

eh, that's not true. the chemical is stressing it just as much. as for the self-pollinating inbreeding... it won't hurt much of anything the first few times. the article above says you won't really notice any problems with it until the 5th or 6th generation. so, I thnk it's definitely worth trying with one female if you have a few plants and want to try to produce some feminized seeds.

 

did you not read what I said? you're only doing this 1 time. I don't think you realize just how many seeds you are going to get. enough for plenty of grows! and if you don't want to keep using seeds, then start taking cuttings for clones.

the increased susceptibility to becoming hermies won't even be a noticeable difference the first generation. you don't need to avoid or worry about anything. they should be female seeds.

 

I've made femmed seeds plenty of time by light stressing. I almost never grow a hermie.