Hey, I was wondering if saving the money, and going with normal seeds is okay. I obviously want female plants but I don't have the wallet for fem seeds. So... Is there a way of making sure that at least half of the normal seeds become female?
Your question is likely to re-spark an ongoing debate. Some believe gender can be influenced, others (myself included) believe gender is genetically pre-determined, which if true means that each of your seeds has a 50/50 chance of being female. Even with such odds you could get, say, 7 females out of 10 or 7 males out of 10. As for saving money by buying "normal" rather than feminized seeds, again you are likely to re-spark an ongoing debate. Femmed seeds are created when a female plant is specially manipulated, usually with a particular hormone but possibly also with specific light schedule, to outwardly produce male pollen sacs but the pollen is all feminized. When this pollen is used to pollinate a female plant, the resulting seeds are all genetically female. Many will claim that feminized seeds result in hermies. Invariably, those who say so have not actually grown with femmed seeds. Those who have are pretty unanimous to my reading in saying that they have never had a male or a hermie from their femmed seeds. I can definitely tell you that is my experience. And I definitely think it is worth the premium -- in fact, I think femmed seeds save you money. First off, femmed seeds don't cost double what the non-femmed of the same strain do. So if you have to throw away half the plants from the "regular" seeds, your cost per female seed actually is higher that way and lower with femmed seeds. But the costs continue. Most of us have a finite grow space that can hold only so many plants. Wouldn't you want all of that space filled with females rather than (on average) only half that space? You will spend a great deal of money on the soil, additives, nutes, electricity, equipment, supplies, etc to veg out your plants only to find that half of them were male and had to be trashed. You could have been running a smaller operation, or you could have filled that space with 100% guaranteed females. To me it is well worth the few extra dollars up front to get 100% females.
toasty is dead on correct!......fems save time, money, and much work, and the stress of waiting to sex.....would never use anything else.
cool thanks for the info! me and a couple of buds were thinking of doing a very small scale grow and fem seeds seemed to be the most straightforward. I have yet another question: what is your opinion on dwarf strains and auto flowering strains?