My set up is a 600W with a MH conversion for veg and an HPS for flower. I use a flood table on stilts (from a failed flood and drain attempt) to catch and drain run off from my hand watering. This flood table is big enough to fit nine five gallon buckets or 12-16 (cant remember) 3gal smart pots. Here is my conundrum: I started 16 seeds not fem'd. All germ'd but two were sickly so that left me with 14 seedlings. As of now they have been under a 6500k T5 in party cups ( I know shame on me ) for 28 days. Surprisingly all 14 are growing incredibly well despite not even being close to rooting the entire cup. Each has 4-5 super compact nodes, but they all stretched 4" before the first node cause I didn't have the light close enough, so I want to transplant in order to bury that wasted height. Now my legal plant limit is 12, so I was planning on culling the two weaker ones to get to 12. My problems lies in that since these are regular seeds, I'm going to get some males. With these genetics I've gotten a 75% female ratio for 3 grows in a row, but you never know lol. Should I cull them down to the best 9 in order to have 5gal root space but risk having fewer females? Or should I plant the best 12 in 3gal pots, sacrificing yield in order to have a cushion for male/female ratio? IME plants perform way better with 5gal of root space compared to 3gal. I've done a side by side with clones from the same mom and had 40% greater yields from the 5 gal plants. But that's just my newbie experience