Hi, all. Hope all the grows going well out there. I decided to try my hand at making some feminized seeds - I'm still in the process, as you'll see - and ran into some snags that I'm sure many of you experienced as well. I mean I've got to assume there must be a few growers out there besides myself that like the idea of saving 10-15 bucks a bean, or am I just cheap? Anyways, I looked up a few tutorials and found out a few key points. The most informative I found was here on GrowWeedEasy.com, a great site I'm sure plenty of you are familiar with already. I decided I wanted to test it out on two autos I have - Crop King's Jack Herer and Sonoma Seed's White Widow - and got the beans sprouted while I searched for a suitable treatment. To make fem'd seeds you need to stress a female plant into producing male pollen sacs. You collect the pollen and fertilize a female bud (or even let the pollen-bearing female inseminate herself) and let the seeds mature. There are a few ways to stress a plant into reversing sex; I chose to spray colloidal silver on them. According to most sources, drenching the bud sites of a female plant with 30+ ppm of colloidal silver (or CS) solution 2 times a day will do the trick. Seeing that CS was a health supplement that people ingest, I felt more relaxed about it being involved in my smoke. So CS being my chosen method, my next decision would be which one to use, and this is where I hit my first real obstacle. Just for the fun of it, I'm going to do this post as a serial. I'm still involved in this whole process and it seems to be going well, but to give it a little drama (and prevent one stupid long-ass rant), I'm going to break it up into a few posts and deliver them over a few days. Enjoy yourselves, there's always... Enuff4All2Share
Don't know about the auto's. It would be great if you could get feminized auto beans that way. Buy one seed of everything and CS is and have a hundred of those. Doubt it will work and stay the same, but I'll watch your posting.
I think you have a good plan. Excessive darkness might also help them along to go hermie..but confirm with more experienced growers.
By the way , you cannot smoke or ingest the plant that has had the colloidal silver treatment . I didn't know you would have the length of grow cycle to get bananas on an auto female , you will probably have to stagger the planting so you can have pollen ready to pollinate early enough to get good seed maturity. Good luck though, i'll keep an eye out to see how it goes. I am making balls on a girl with c.s. at the moment but the cold temps outside are really stunting things, probably i'll have to wait until the weather warms up, 5 weeks of c.s. and bananas are only just showing.
It defintely works. I would recommend at least 50ppm on the CS. It speeds up the process a little bit. I have a genetics tent that Ive been messing around with the past few months, its been alot of fun. You dont have to spray the whole plant down if your trying to make the CS last, but honestly if you want enough pollen to last, hit the whole plant. Pollen can be saved !
Thanks for the words, friends. It's a great subject with lots of info - GOOD and BAD - available online, so I thought I'd try it and report. Now... where did I leave off? Oh yes... which Colloidal Silver do I use? Colloidal silver is a simple substance - small silver particles suspended in distilled water. The concentration of particles is expressed as Particles Per Million, or PPM - a term many of us are already familiar with. To perform a reversal of sex on a female cannabis plant, a C.S. with a PPM of 30 or more is required. Apparently these small silver particles will interfere with hormone pruduction in the plant and stress it into forming pollen sacks. Neat! Now where do I get my silver? Basically it's buy it or make it. For my first go-round I thought it'd be easier to purchase a pre-made product and go from there, so I set about some research to find a reliable (and hopefully inexpensive) source. Easier said then done! This is the point in my journey where I discovered the staggering amount of conflicting advice and info out there. "This one is better, that one isn't pure, my buddy tried this and it didn't work, I tried that one and aliens attacked, etc." One of the only brands with multiple success stories was Tiresias spray, but I found it quite expensive for the small amount in the bottle (around $25-30 for 1 fluid ounce, plus shipping), especially since I didn't know how much I'd need. Last thing I wanted was to get 3/4 of the way there and run dry. I kept looking but, for one reason or another (price, no-shipping to Canada, ambiguous reports on quality) all the products ended up just short of ideal. I was almost ready to give up when a little window popped up in Amazon's "You may also be interested in..." window (love my algorithm!) displaying this: Just looking at the product inspired confidence... I mean, like, there's a big frickin' psychedelic shroom on the front, right!?! So I made the purchase and waited for the mail... and this is getting a l'il long, so I'll sign off for now. Next time we'll find out how this whole process works as we start the spraying. BBS!
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Very good point. I have two 5 packs of seeds and sprouted one of each as a pollen plant, leaving me 4 of each - the right number for Canadian Recreational Growing. This way I'll have the pollen already in the freezer for when I do a closet full of the autos.
Another thing you can do is what I do. It's called rodelization and is super simple. All you have to do is allow a plant to flower a little longer then usual. The plant will pop seeds in a last ditch effort to pass on its genetics.
Go for it. It doesnt produce a ton of seed. The buds are still good and usable not packed full of seeds. Lots of growers do it without even knowing they did. Then they get all worried thinking something bad/incorrect caused it or blamed it on bad genetics when its just the plant doing what a plant does. Anyways, I pretty much always do it with a new stain or when I want to switch up what I'm growing so that I can regrow that strain in the future. It's way safer then colloidal silver or the other types of sprays that initiate the process. It's an old school technique that got buried long ago when those types of product became main stream. You can't even smoke the bud once you use colloidal silver do to toxins. This doesnt hurt the bud, maybe a bit more couch lock then some want on some strains. Good way to end up with a bedtime indica or to tame down an intense sativa. I'm not a commercial grower or breeder. I do not need a ton of seeds to sell. A small handful will set me straight for awhile. Once I get a few mature seeds I chop. Usually end up with a couple immature seeds but they're easy to pick out.
I've not heard of this - exciting! Every rodelization technique I stumbled upon centered around messing with light cycles or extreme temps and/or humidity. How much time would this process add to a mature plant?
Going to depend on the plant. Not much though. Extreme temps and messing with lights will cause a plant to hermie but what is this with humidity? I grow in humidity well over 90% at times and never had an issue. I quite battling humidity long ago. My outdoor plants would definetly be seeded out. Temps pushing 100 so is the humidity sometimes. I call bunk on that. Plants actually like high humidity. Keep a lot of circulation going to prevent mold and they will be fine
When last we checked in, I had ordered the colloidal silver on Amazon. It arrived and I bought a small spray bottle, good to hold about 75ml. My two autoflowers were just beginning to make pompoms so I began spraying. Most sources I'd read instructed to saturate the budding sites although a few said stems, leaves, or everything all over. To me it made sense to try the budding sites first. My few ounces of potion wouldn't be able to stretch very far if I had to soak a small bush. I started by spraying 3 times a day, then moved to 2 after a week. In 10 days, the pistils started browning and curling up. Around day 20, my first little nanners peeped out. Within days I had some nice little colas of pollen sacs. I stopped spraying them down and waited for my magic powder to drop. And as the little male flowers started opening up... nothing. The pollen sacs were empty!! I quickley started searching out infos on where I went wrong. I can already see some of you nodding your heads. Okay then - go ahead. What did I do wrong? (In the interest of not increasing the amount of worry and anxiety in a world already rife with troubling issues, let me assure the reader that I did stumble upon the error of my ways and eventually harvested a little pollen from each of the plants. Rest easy. There's Ultimately... Enuff4All2Share)
i think you would have had more success if you had used regular seeds for making you female seeds and not using autos ,,,just my opinion though ,,,mac,
ok mate i'll be popping in to see how things go ( good ) ,,nothing like making your own fem seed ,,,a mate i knew few years ago used to make is own fem seed ,,,i never had one go hermie on me ,,mac.
Well give us the "Paul Harvey" the rest of the story. And keep an update as to if the seed you made are female and auto's also, and the quality of the plant. Like is it a copy or close or stringy worthless
Did you need to tickle them (bananas)or pop them to get the pollen out ? It is good to here that you can get pollen from an auto , hopefully it is fertile. will keep an eye out for developments.