I see a lot of posts where people are growing 1 or 2 plants, from seedling. I would like to discuss in general how many seeds individual growers start with, at the beginning to the grow. Do you start just 1 or 2 or 20? I am interested in your selection procedures from choosing the seeds to who gets to be the ones that complete flowering I understand that if you order seeds and get only 10, do you start all ten or 1? I only have grown bag seed or seed I have generated in my own breeding program, so I have plenty. I usually start soaking 30-40 seeds and the first 24 that sprout tails (and look healthy) I put into peet pots to grow. 24 is the number that fit in the 2x2 ft spot under my 400w MH I weed these 24 down to 16- 1 gal pots and let veg SOG. From these, the top 4-6 females are selected to complete the flower process. What do you other experienced growers do?
Well I like to plan like this say you want to have 10 plants at the end I say times that by 3 say a thired of your seeds dont pop get sick or die or a thired are male then that leaves nice leeway for getimg the number of plants you want this is how I worked it out for my out side grows amd just scale it back a.bit for indoor
I just finished sexing my 16 plants and of them, 3 were outright males, 3 were hermies, 10 are female. About normal, 50/50 male female. Yhis is why I am inquiring about numbers. Some growers seem to indicate that they have jst one plant. Who whould start just one plant? What if the seed was a dud. You have to start a few just so you can end up with some females if you get bad odds with the whole M/F thing
My first grow here. My aim is to flower 3 or 4. I Germed 16 and put them in starters. Out of those, 10 came up. Of those I picked the best looking six to veg. Hopefully with the 50/50 ratio that will leave me 3 , maybe 4 come flowering time. No way I would only do one unless it was a clone, or a fem'd seed. I would be super pissed to get the whole setup going and take care of a plant for a month or more just to find out it was male. I am using bag seed, and statistically it is completely possible for all six of mine to be males or herms, but very improbable. Next grow will be coming from better seeds if I dont wreck this one.
If you don't know what you're doing and plan to waste a shitload of seeds that's the way to do it. But if you DO know what you're doing and DO HAVE quality seeds which you paid top dollar for, then this a waste. You're not going to have a 1/3 die on you when you germinate correctly with quality genetics. I learned this the hard way and put myself in a tough situation of having to kill off some perfectly healthy and beautiful female plants to have enough room for my original plan. I got a 100% germination rate with what I did, because I read and planned carefully on what to do in every aspect of germination procedure including temperature, humidity, air, moisture and light. If you're using regular seeds ok, go ahead and plant 2 times what you want to get in the end just because of the male factor. If you're using quality and especially quality femmed seeds, just plant 1 or 2 extra, tops. But no way should you do 3 times what you want.
I started 18, 18 popped, within the first week, 6 were dead, and over the following 4 or 5 weeks I had one auto into a full blown male (odd considering they were supposed to be all WW) in this same time frame I took 3 suspected lady's to the garden to experiment 3 different ways of growing them, and 3 of the strongest looking went to the flowering cabinet, the rest got shredded and mulched.
If you have the seeds i think its a great idea to start with more than you'll need. look at my journal for example. i started 200+ bagseed lol. granted i had to kill em all off however it was great since i could tell which ones were winners and which were the runts/losers. if you have the bagseed (or the $$$$ to do it with "name brand" genetics) then go for it. That way you can keep the strongest ones of the most similar height (for example when i did my 200 bagseed i started by eliminating the runts and the stretchy giants 1st and tried to keep the ones of all the same/similar height THEN start picking the best ones from that group). however if i have beans from breeders i rarely start 2-3 more than i plan on keeping (breeder genetics aren't cheap for me!)