Question for anyone with some understanding of how hermies work genetically... I grew three female plants recently. One sprouted ONE set of male flowers at ONE node. I don't know why this happened (the seeds were old, could be it)...but only one node of one plant sprouted a male flower, and pollen. This caused some pollenation to occur...not much (one plant had all of one seed on it, another none. The plant that went hermie, the node below where the male flower was had seeds all over it...but that was it). Here is my question...since both genetically contributing plants were female (one just happened to have one male flower on one node), are these seeds more likely to be female? I understand human genetics, each parent contributing a "sex" chromosome, and this determines the gender of the offspring. Is it similar in plant genetics? Or, since half the genetic material came from a male/pollen, does this mean the contributed genetic material of this plant was male, too? Or did the pollen have female-like genes and chromosomes, and thus any off-spring would be female? Any ideas?
You made feminized seeds. The male flowers were from a female plant so thier chromos are XXy. You pollinated an XX with XXy therefor you will most likely get female XX seeds. The "recessive" y could come out and make some male seeds but the rate should be fairly low.
The seeds you have are basically a ghetto version (or the first step) of a feminized seed line. The seeds you have are more likely to be female, but they are also more likely to be hermies. Breeders stablize fem strains by backcrossing and other breeding techniques to get fem seeds almost to the quality of regular seeds, just with a five times more likelihood that they will be female. hope this helps
