Creating Female Seeds Using Colloidal Silver - With High Brix

Hello fellow pollen pluckers, I noticed some people having a bit of trouble and I wanted to offer up a bit of advice I got from fellow member fanleaf. I have included the question I asked him so you all would have an idea of what we were talking about but the important part is in the process he describes in his response. I have grown 2 rounds successfully following these instructions. One female purple express auto and one photo female tigers blood aka charlie sheen have successfully produced seeds. The purple express was done first and I have since sprouted many good offspring and they were all female auto's just like their mom : ) One interesting thing, a few seemed to top themselves while very young. Anyway, I just wanted to share. The mist is expensive but works. Hope this may help. Good luck all!

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My question: If I treat one plant (auto white widow) with colloidal silver, like in your video, the seeds it produces will be auto fem seeds, right? So this is a one plant process for getting many seeds?

I am a little confused because of the pollen collecting I've seen people do. Why would one need to collect pollen from one plant to pollinate another if the seeds they are getting pollen from are already auto fem seeds?

I hope my question is clear to you, I am considering building a small box just for this process. I have 8 auto fem seeds and would love to have 100's more. Thanks for your time!

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No problem on the help.
Here's the thing. Some people have trouble with timing to get a single plant to develop the pollen in time to pollinate itself and have enough life left to produce the seeds so they grow 1 plant to collect the pollen and then grow another to pollinate it with in time. This can bring some issues with it though. Yes, those would all be fem seeds because both parents would have been female however you never know what traits will come through from what parent when doing it that way. Basically every strain is a cross breed of other strains and doing that can make any traits randomly show up from seed to seed.
Does that make sense?

Now, how I and many others stop that from happening is this. Firstly don't skimp on the Colloidal Silver. Being new to it I HIGHLY suggest buying Tiresias Mist. It can be found on eBay. In their 1oz bottle they say there is plenty there to do a plant or more. DONT LISTEN TO THAT PART AND JUST GET A LARGER BOTTLE OR 2 SMALL BOTTLES!!! Here's the reason....

They say and so many people who use it listen to the directions and wait until the plant starts to go into the flower cycle before they start spraying a branch......That's why they run out of time and have to use 2 plants...I select 1 good sized lower branch and put a thick paper behind the branch to protect the rest of the plant from overspray and I START SPRAYING THAT BRANCH AT 3 WEEKS OLD IF ITS AN AUTO and 1 WEEK BEFORE FLIPPING TO 12/12 if it's a photoperiod plant.

I place the paper behind the branch, give it 3-4 pumps of spray every single day until I see the branch starting to change from the rest of the plant or if its an auto I do it until the rest of the plant is showing flowers about te size of a penny on the tops . This usually takes 10-12 days on photo plants and 10-20 on autos and then I stop. Then male flowers will form rapidly. This usually takes more than 1 small bottle of Tiresias Mist but not much more than 1 bottle.

So the key is to start treating a bit earlier than recommended. Then as the male flowers form and I see they are mostly developed I pluck 1 or 2 off every day and twist it open by rolling it in my fingers. When I start to see they are mature enough to see pollen come out I speed the process by waiting just a few more days and by then I can usually see which sacks will provide pollen if broke open. I manually pluck 1 at a time and hold it over the plant and sprinkle the pollen over the plant. I do this every day with about 6-8 pollen sacks per day for 4-6 days. I leave the rest of the sacks on the plant to break open on their own and do more whenever they decide.
Doing this cuts down on the time by a week or 2 that the sacks wouldn't have broken open on their own yet. Does that make sense?

doing it this way you not only have fem seeds but the only genetics involved are all from 1 plant. You will get all fem seeds that are 100% genetic clones of the plant they came from.
 
Gee64 said:
Forgive me for not back reading the thread yet. I definitely will when I get a free evening.
I have a question....
What technique do you guys use to determine if the plant is a female or do you just spray and hope its not a male?
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Hey Gee, my technique has been to start with good genetics from good seed banks to ensure they are female. For the tigers blood/charlie sheen I grew a mother plant that I vegged long enough to see was a female. I had to do it that way because it was a bag seed.
 
I've had seeds from a reputable breeder designated as "feminized" be male. They promptly replaced the seeds, but that's still a possibility. In my experience it's best to get a good vigorous plant, take clones, then put the plant the clones were taken from into flower. If it's a female, then obviously the clones will be too. No guesswork there.
 
Icemud said:
Me too... tons of pods... no pollen...

I did find like maybe 5 total seeds on 2 different plants so I may have gotten a trickle of pollen out.. but overall disappointed in my last attempt. I even left the reversed male plant in with the females the whole flower cycle, shaking it daily and even picking off clusters of pollen sacks and grinding them in my fingers over the females...

I think I am spraying CS too long into flowering so next attempt I will spray 2x a day for 1st week, 1x a day for 2nd week and no more spraying after day 15. I will see if that works :)
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I've found 15 days to be plenty for photos and only spray once a day around lights on during flower (total of 15 treatments). Two grows in a row now where nanners inside the sacs were just stuffed with pollen using this method. I Only spray the entire plant first 2 days and just tiny squirts at each node the rest of treatments. Got hundreds of seeds from my previous bubble gum run. This run is just as good. I do it like gov for photos. Take a small clone, make sure its well rooted, and put it into flower 7-10 days before recipient plants. I have found that a small 8oz spray bottle I use (@ 50 ppm) can convert 5 to 8 small clones so it doesn't take much.

Next round I'm going to try spraying once a day, every other day for a total of 7-8 treatments. I'll also have a separate clone and do once a day for 2 weeks, just in case, since I know it works.

Here are my dedicated clones for seeds on current run. Every bud site is stuffed with seeds.
IMG_029762.jpg
IMG_031264.jpg


Good luck on your next run!
 
Gee64 said:
If I were to cut 2 clones from 1 plant and use CS to get pollen from one and pollinate the other would I get perfect phenos of the mother similar to clone cuts or would various phenos still be in the dna?
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You'd still see some variability because the way the DNA shuffles around. So it's like the alphabet, even though you're getting the exact alphabet, the order might be screwed around a little bit.

But the caveat is once you take your S1 generation (selfed generation) and then self it against itself to make S2, it starts to re-inforce the order, and by the time you get to S8 you will have it very stabilized and without much variability but it might not be too much like what you started with.
 
Gee64 said:
Ive read many times you shouldnt use colloidal silver on feminized plants as it can cause hermys. To get to s8 would I save my original pollen and use it generation after generation? If so whats the best way ti store it?
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That's a fairly complicated subject which I'm sure I'll make a lot of errors discussing but basically... Phenotype = genotype + envrionment. What happens when you continually self-pollinate plants is that the traits which are recessive gain dominance, and so that's why it is useful for stabilizing certain traits you want. Say you planted a strain that you get a few purple phenotypes out of; you clone that phenotype, and you self-pollinate, grow that batch up, pick the purples, self-pollinate, and slowly over time that purple gene expression becomes dominant and you have a stabilized phenotype.

SO this same process can bring into dominance certain traits that are undesirable, such as hermaphroditism. You may have heard there's a specific gene that causes this, or that some strains can go hermie and some can't, but in reality all cannabis strains have the ability to produce staminate ( male ) flowers on an otherwise pistillate ( female ) plant. In fact, the whole "male" and "female" thing in cannabis is a real misnomer, and what you should really consider is that when we say "female" we actually mean pistillate, and all pistillate cannabis plants have the ability to produce staminate flowers as a reproductive mechanism. It's just that most pistillate varieties have this trait as a recessive gene, and it's not activated until environmental factors induce it. In accidental contexts, that means things like light leaks, bad light schedules, high heat, etc.; in purposeful contexts, that means things like purposefully letting it flower too long ( rodelization ) and chemical/hormonal treatments ( CS, STS ). But again, phenotype = genotype + envrionment, so if the more you reinforce the trait that helps it survive in one environment, the more that trait becomes expressed in that phenotype. The unwanted side-effect is that you start to bring into dominance the trait that causes staminate flowers to form, the plants think, "Well hey, we are use to this envrionment, we know it's going to need to happen, so let's just do it anyway," and you end up with a phenotype that will "go hermie" more often than not.

But the thing is growers act like this is somehow polluting the gene pool, in reality these traits are already in the gene pool, and it's mostly a matter of back-crossing with phenotypes until you force this trait back into recession. Realistically when you "stabilize" a plant out to the 8th generation, you're actually severely crippling its genetic diversity and you'll end up each generation with more "mutants" than the last until your strain grows small, its vigor is reduced, it won't be as resistant to pests or disease, but it will all be very much alike. So it's not really worth much to have a strain that will be very much alike from one seed to the next, if it will grow like garbage, so at that point breeders will back-cross it against the original S1 generation, or out-cross with an entirely different strain ( better option ). Out-crossing will require more pheno-hunting, but at that point you can then carry it out with regular familial breeding rather than self'ing and avoid the loss of vigor or reinforcing of hermaphroditic traits.

Buuuut all that hot wind later, this really depends on what your goals are with creating an S1 crop. If you just want to create a seed stock of feminized seeds, then by all means save S1 pollen and just stick with the S1 generation. You probably won't see any real problems happen out until after the S4 generation, but if you don't actually have any goal in taking it out that far in terms of strain stabilization then it's worth it to just avoid it.

On the other hand, let's say you got some bag seed, that's likely S1, and if you wanted to create a feminized crop of that it would be S2. That becomes a trickier situation because you have to ask yourself, "Why did this strain self-pollinate in the first place?" and weigh whether or not you want to risk it. Me personally, I got some S1 Blackberry Kush and took it to S2 and don't really have any worries about it. I still haven't grown the S2 but I'm reasonably sure the instances I've seen it go hermaphorditic are because 1) People are trying to flower it for too long and 2) There was on batch that was the result of a power outage. In this instance it was more about preserving the genetics of a rare strain.

Wow I didn't realize this got that long when typing it in this tiny window...
 
TheFertilizer said:
Wow I didn't realize this got that long when typing it in this tiny window...
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Very good info Fertilizer. Much appreciated. Thanks for sharing.

:thumb:
 
Gee64 said:
lol all good info but I just want some fem seeds and was wondering if by pollinating a plant with its own shemale pollen would it be an exact replica like a twin or would it be a random mix of all available genes just as 2 brothers can be very different.
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Okay I'm gonna bombard you with more questionable information...

No it won't be like an exact twin but I think it's more akin to familial interbreeding where it will be very alike to the mother, with some mutants and odd-balls. I wish I knew more about that, but I asked my plant science teacher and he said it won't produce an exact replica because the DNA still can get rearranged but since each pair is in mostly the same order there will be less variation than if you were using two radically different sets of DNA.

So like imagine you had two alphabets, you put them together, and then they use the same elements of each to produce a new combination... So A + A = A, B + B = B, and so on, so you get an exactly copy...

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

= Identical

But then say something screws up (which sometimes happens for reasons that are beyond my comprehension but long story short it's called epigenics and deals with how DNA changes over growth)

Instead some of the DNA has changed and so you'll be pollinating like this...

BACDEFHGIJKLMNXPQRSTUVWOYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

So then obviously if A + A was supposed to come out A, then B + A comes out something totally different and produces a genetic code radically different from what it started with. Then there's just the breakdown of mitosis that happens when the genetic diversity lowers, so instead of having exact copies of the DNA, some of it might be missing chromosomes and the plant just has to fill things in, and that's what mostly leads deformities as the plant essentially starts to "forget" how to make itself.

But anyway long story short, it's not exact, but I think it's about as close to "exact" as you can get without cloning. Even with familial interbreeding there will be more chance of genetic re-ordering than if you used self-breeding. In my experience, you don't end up with a lot of "odd-ball" plants that are different like siblings would be, but rather more odd-ball plants that are just totally one-off mutants.

In some ways that's advantageous, because you will be able to tell which ones are the ones you don't want with a simple glance, rather than having to wait until you're at a certain growth stage to see differences like you'd be doing with familial interbreeding.
 
So i just started spraying my purple kush about a week ago with cs.... around 150 ppm.... how long does it usually take before pollen balls (lol) start forming? Just curious on a most-of-the-time answer
 
Well, first, 150 is way stronger than necessary. Not sure if it could cause negative effects. I really never used higher than 60-ish. I buy 250 ppm and dilute with distilled water. Second, I've found (and heard) not all CS works which is why most of us recommend a specific brand. It also depends on the overall maturity of the plant being sprayed. If it was mature, then usually you'll see some results within 2 weeks of bloom phase.
 
Governmentchz said:
Well, first, 150 is way stronger than necessary. Not sure if it could cause negative effects. I really never used higher than 60-ish. I buy 250 ppm and dilute with distilled water. Second, I've found (and heard) not all CS works which is why most of us recommend a specific brand. It also depends on the overall maturity of the plant being sprayed. If it was mature, then usually you'll see some results within 2 weeks of bloom phase.
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Which brand do you use?
 
Gee64 said:
Which brand do you use?
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I think Silver Mountain is the most popular brand here and probably the 240 ppm variety he's talking about.

It's SUPER easy to make your own too. I still have a few tablespoons left over from when I generated some last time. The most important part to making your own is to use distilled water because otherwise there's too much contaminants and they'll bond to the silver particles not allowing the plant to absorb them. Really depends on how many times you think you're gonna wanna do this, but to buy a generation kit is about as costly as buying a single bottle but it will produce so much more CS.
 
Was just wondering when I should really keep a Vigilant eye open for pollen sacs I think today I started to notice some of the white hairs disappearing on the one branch that I've been spraying.... thanks y'all
 
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