Male to Female ratio?

[SouthAfricano]

I have searched everywhere to get something about the male to female ratio of cannabis plants but can't really find anything, and I wasn't sure where to post this so I figured flowering cycle makes sense. In you guy's experience, when using non-feminized seeds, or even bagseed, what where your ratio of male to female? I expected about 50/50 but then my rasta friend told me he normally gets 8/10 females. Now here in SA we mostly grow bagseed because the growers themselves tend to keep the best male in a batch to ensure the continuation of a crop (most weed being grown outdoors, directly in the soil. Indoor weed tends to not have seeds except for a stray or two because they seem to keep the breeding stock separate, unlike with outdoors. Is this 8/10 ratio normal? Is it maybe due to all but one male being killed in most crops?

The thing that tends to surprise me often is the quality of the weed regardless of the seed content. I am growing out some Lemon Skunk that was almost as good as seedless indoor cheese, and it was PACKED with seed. I got 8 plants growing out of a single 1g bud's seeds. In any case tho, I'm curious as to what I can expect... I'm pouring in quite a bit of resources into quite a few plants, including some cheese, white widow, Port st Johns (local landrace with unique properties), and the Lemon Skunk, and I'm curious as to how many of them are going to end up male...

Sorry for rambling my brain just works funny lol. TLDR: What is the average male-female ratio in cannabis.

 

[hydro1000]

If you can get 1 female for every 3 seeds IMO that's pretty good. Some get all female, some get all male, it's a game of chance Mother Nature gets to decide......... I'm pretty sure of this, if I'm wrong someone please correct me - femanized seeds will be female or hermi, regular seed can end up any of the three

 

[PurpleGunRack]

Like when germinating humans the probability is 1:2, but unlike humans there aren't any statistics on cannabis gender.

The 8/10 ratio could be down to evolution, like with elephants where small tusks are now the dominating gene because poachers go for the elephants with the big tusks and thus letting the males with small tusks mate more.
So if the plants **know** that most males will be killed and they will get the pollen they need anyway it would be smarter to make more females to maintain/expand the species. Would be awesome if someone were to make a scientific study on this

If you want to be sure get feminized seeds, otherwise all you can do is hope.

Happy growing

 

[SouthAfricano]

I'd like to do this some time. I'm going to see what my ratios are using South African bagseed from mostly high grade weed grown by idiots. I'm getting some seriously fast growing pheno's here, and even when I ran into a pH problem where a few got burned bad by the municipal water suddenly going from 7 to 9 on the pH scale (my rasta's plants just basically half died, but I caught mine in time and saved his from total death. They don't know about pH testing and what not, they usually just grow it straight in the ground with some organic soil amendments. Works 100% when municipal water is 7, and the soil is just slightly too acidic from all the organic stuff in there (they love guano and get like 18ft trees from it) but when the water fucks out... In any case another thing I heard is it is environmentally based and you can get more females by making sure the plants don't get shocked and what not. Well my plants are getting decent treatment but obviously since the last time I grew I was like 15 I'm making a lot of mistakes still, but at the same time I'm correcting them before they become problems. I'd say my grow should be a good indicator of the average, and I'll also check what the gender of the plants that got affected by the pH before I could fix it, compared to those who didn't suffer any stress at all.

The other possibility is that with bagseed a good portion of those seeds could be from hermie plants pollinating pure females. Now that is how feminized seeds are made. I'm almost 100% sure the Lemon Skunk I smoked was a hermie, so I'll keep an eye on the lemon skunk.

 

[dredge91]

I see a 50/50 ratio .

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[DeanB]

I usually go by the 50/50 ratio but my last grow I had 1 male out of 6 seeds and my current grow, I have 0 males out of 4 seeds. mexican bagseed.

 

[dredge91]

Still go with the 50/50 hope for the best expect the worse

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[TorturedSoul]

I have searched everywhere to get something about the male to female ratio of cannabis plants but can't really find anything, and I wasn't sure where to post this so I figured flowering cycle makes sense. In you guy's experience, when using non-feminized seeds, or even bagseed, what where your ratio of male to female? I expected about 50/50 but then my rasta friend told me he normally gets 8/10 females. Now here in SA we mostly grow bagseed because the growers themselves tend to keep the best male in a batch to ensure the continuation of a crop (most weed being grown outdoors, directly in the soil. Indoor weed tends to not have seeds except for a stray or two because they seem to keep the breeding stock separate, unlike with outdoors. Is this 8/10 ratio normal? Is it maybe due to all but one male being killed in most crops?

Consider this: In nature, cannabis doesn't need one male plant for each female plant - as anyone who has ever planted a crop outside within ¼-mile or so of a male plant can tell you, one male plant can pollinate LOTS of female ones. You could think of cannabis plants as herd animals, lol.

So if one male cannabis plant is fully capable of fertilizing many (as in hundreds or more, depending on factors such as wind, topography, et cetera) female ones, then why would the plant have evolved to produce a 50:50 sex ratio? The answer is, "It didn't." I suspect that the only reason that the (natural) M:F ratio isn't even more skewed towards the extreme in terms of females is that (a) if the natural order of things is only ONE male cannabis plant per, IDK, square mile and something happens to that one male plant, a lot of female plants won't get fertilized at all(*) and (b) genetic diversity is generally considered to be a good thing and - just like cats - a mature female cannabis plant can be fertilized by multiple males at the same time and, thus, produce a litter of kittens I mean a bunch of seeds that had multiple male parents.

Here is some food for thought that may be of interest (and helpful). It has been floating around the Internet for years and has been reposted many times (IIRC, I myself have done so in 2011 or before, so it would have originally been published before then). It's mostly common sense if one understands the optimum conditions under which cannabis can grow, flower, and produce offspring (which is, after all, any species' main purpose). The meat of the information begins at "Feminised Cannabis Seeds" Courtesy of Dutch Passion.

Of course, nothing is set in stone. Just like the hypothetical situation where someone flips a penny 99 times and sees heads come up all 99 times, it is still possible to flip it the 100th time... and see heads again, lol. So if you take, say, two seeds, it is still possible that both will end up being male (or female). However, statistically, with a decent sampling (number of seeds) over time, you should see significantly more female plants than male ones.

BtW, I wasn't kidding about the cats - a female in heat that gets out and comes back pregnant can have a litter of kittens with each kitten having a different father. Thank goodness that people aren't built that way, or we'd probably have surpassed 15 billion people years ago (if not during the "free love" era, at least after Hollywood started portraying the worst behavior as mainstream... and the mouthbreathers decided to believe it).

(*)Many female plants, lacking a male to pollinate them, will eventually turn hermaphrodite if allowed to flower long enough (which is not the same as a plant being predisposed towards hermaphrodism). This can be <COUGH>somewhat<COUGH> annoying if you've got a room full of honest to goodness "no buzz-ceiling" long-flowering sativas that have been flowering for 14-16 weeks and you're not paying close attention . Then again, seeded cannabis tends to finish quicker than sinsemilla, since the plant's mission in life has been accomplished - but THC production falls off after the female flowers get fertilized, so....

 

[GenuineBuddy]

Of course, nothing is set in stone. Just like the hypothetical situation where someone flips a penny 99 times and sees heads come up all 99 times, it is still possible to flip it the 100th time... and see heads again, lol.

I know this is a wicked old thread and this has nothing to do with the topic but I'm stoned so thought I'd share something: there's always a 1 in 2 chance of heads coming up no matter how many times in a row heads have come up before, making the chance of flipping heads the 100th time not just possible but equally as likely as tails.

 

[wiley420]

My rule of thumb is 5 seedlings 3 female 2 male usually sometimes 4 female. But I always get more females to male. Last 5 seeds I planted 1 didn't take 3 females 1 male. Generally I believe the majority of seeds will be female imo


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