Regular seeds: How do you plant them?

johnehazeharvester

johnehazeharvester

Well-Known Member
How does everyone plant regular seeds? my last grow I planted two regular seeds and they were both males. I did collect pollen, so that was OK . My next run with regulars, I plan on putting two of those seeds in a 5 gallon pot and growing them out and culling males otherwise I will grow out two females in the pot. I’ll grow a few others of a different strain in 2 gallon pots and try to get clones of everything before Flower.
 
johnehazeharvester said:
How does everyone plant regular seeds? my last grow I planted two regular seeds and they were both males.
Click to expand...
Law of averages or something like that. Stuff happens. ;) . But, yes, I have grown from regular seeds. Not to many seeds since I take cuttings from every plant that gets taller than 6 inches and have the clones before long. Yes, I take cuttings from every plant and if a week or two later I find out one is male I can get rid of that one and any clones that came from the plant.

johnehazeharvester said:
My next run with regulars, I plan on putting two of those seeds in a 5 gallon pot and growing them out and culling males otherwise I will grow out two females in the pot.
Click to expand...
While it can make sense to do this sort of thing, it will rarely, rarely ever work out. If you are growing in a soil mix then it can mean two plants are trying to grow with the same amount of soil (5 gallons) which is often barely enough for one plant.

You could try using some smaller pots, maybe 1 gallon and growing one plant in each. As they grow larger transplant to a larger pot and watch for any that are showing pre-flowers. Any plant that shows female pre-flowers can end up in a 5 gallon pot by itself. And the transplanting can help develop a better root mass by the time the plant ends up in the final 5 gallon pot.

At one time I was playing around with getting one ounce off one clone while being grown in a gallon of soil. Eventually I was getting close. Then, I experimented with the two plants in one pot idea. Several clones were each placed in their own 1 gallon pot. Then two clones were placed in a 1 gallon pot with the same soil. Come harvest time the two plants in the one pot were each about half the size of the plants from the same mother that had been by themselves. That in itself is not a big deal, though.

The single plants each met the one ounce goal. The pot with two plants also met the one ounce goal but it only happened because each plant produced a half ounce. In the long run it was not a productive method and it took more paying attention and more work to keep those two as healthy as the others. I would have been better off with the two plants being in their own pot. Since I was going after a consumable harvest it is a different situation than if I was growing flowers for the way they look or their color.
 
Phytoplankton said:
Basically there's no difference in how you plant reg, fem, or auto seeds. 1 seed per container. With regular seeds it's a 50/50 shot, male or female, I don't know of any way to change those odds.
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I understand. Just wondering what others do when they want to grow them. I dont want to put a male plant in a 5 gallon pot.
 
johnehazeharvester said:
How does everyone plant regular seeds? my last grow I planted two regular seeds and they were both males. I did collect pollen, so that was OK . My next run with regulars, I plan on putting two of those seeds in a 5 gallon pot and growing them out and culling males otherwise I will grow out two females in the pot. I’ll grow a few others of a different strain in 2 gallon pots and try to get clones of everything before Flower.
Click to expand...
Hi @johnehazeharvester

Your opening post proves the rule: with regular seeds you're better off popping more than less. If I want one female, I'll pop three regular seeds, just to be statistically even more likely to get a female. Still no guarantees, but getting three males would be a very rare case.

I grow regular seeds for breeding. I love getting my own homegrown seeds, they're so fresh they just jump out of the rooters. But there's no difference, cultivation-wise, from feminized (though I'm sure there's someone who'll disagree ;)). Regular or "standard" seeds are cheaper but more work. Of course if you want pollen, they're the only way to go.

I soak the seeds 12 hours in a diluted hydrogen peroxide solution, pop them into moist rooters and keep the ambient temperature at a constant 79 F which is the perfect temperature for germinating.

I usually pop a minimum of 5 regular seeds per strain, even if I only want one plant ultimately. You never know what you're going to get, so might as well compensate ahead of time for what you maybe don't want. After about 6 or 8 weeks when they're mature I force flower in a small flowering greenhouse I darken by placing a tarp over it each evening for 12+ hours. After ten days to two weeks, the babes reveal their gender. If say two of the 5 are male, I take a decision on whether to cull or grow them out and harvest pollen, or just chop the males and grow out one or more females.

I wouldn't put two plants in the same 5 gallon pot because if it turns out you want to keep both plants one of them will not thrive as well. I've seen that happen, one will not do well and the other will. If you try to separate them, there could be root damage. To avoid that, the destination should be 1 pot for each plant if you want healthy vigorous growth. It's better to start them off in enough soil to get through the sexing stage, say a 1 L or 1 quart or even 1 gallon. I like smaller because that little greenhouse needs to hold about twenty plants at a time so they can't all have even a whole gallon at this stage. After the plants are mature enough to flower, I'll force flower and if it is a female I want to grow out, I'll up pot to a larger say 5 or 7 gallon pot.

Hope this helps

Cheers

Emeraldo
 
johnehazeharvester said:
I understand. Just wondering what others do when they want to grow them. I dont want to put a male plant in a 5 gallon pot.
Click to expand...
As @Emeraldo said, put them all in 1gallon pots until you can sex them, then up pot them if you want to keep them. Up potting with photos won't cause any appreciable problems. Two plants in one pot never seems to work out well.
 
If you grow the seedings under 12/12 for their first 10 days and then revert to 18/6 or whatever, they will likely show sex by day 30ish.
 
Emeraldo said:
Hi @johnehazeharvester

Your opening post proves the rule: with regular seeds you're better off popping more than less. If I want one female, I'll pop three regular seeds, just to be statistically even more likely to get a female. Still no guarantees, but getting three males would be a very rare case.

I grow regular seeds for breeding. I love getting my own homegrown seeds, they're so fresh they just jump out of the rooters. But there's no difference, cultivation-wise, from feminized (though I'm sure there's someone who'll disagree ;)). Regular or "standard" seeds are cheaper but more work. Of course if you want pollen, they're the only way to go.

I soak the seeds 12 hours in a diluted hydrogen peroxide solution, pop them into moist rooters and keep the ambient temperature at a constant 79 F which is the perfect temperature for germinating.

I usually pop a minimum of 5 regular seeds per strain, even if I only want one plant ultimately. You never know what you're going to get, so might as well compensate ahead of time for what you maybe don't want. After about 6 or 8 weeks when they're mature I force flower in a small flowering greenhouse I darken by placing a tarp over it each evening for 12+ hours. After ten days to two weeks, the babes reveal their gender. If say two of the 5 are male, I take a decision on whether to cull or grow them out and harvest pollen, or just chop the males and grow out one or more females.

I wouldn't put two plants in the same 5 gallon pot because if it turns out you want to keep both plants one of them will not thrive as well. I've seen that happen, one will not do well and the other will. If you try to separate them, there could be root damage. To avoid that, the destination should be 1 pot for each plant if you want healthy vigorous growth. It's better to start them off in enough soil to get through the sexing stage, say a 1 L or 1 quart or even 1 gallon. I like smaller because that little greenhouse needs to hold about twenty plants at a time so they can't all have even a whole gallon at this stage. After the plants are mature enough to flower, I'll force flower and if it is a female I want to grow out, I'll up pot to a larger say 5 or 7 gallon pot.

Hope this helps

Cheers

Emeraldo
Click to expand...
Thanks Emeraldo! This is the kind of info I was looking for. I guess I will put them all in 1 gallon pots then transplant to larger.
 
I wouldn't put more than one plant in each container, either. If you later decide to remove one, untangling the roots may be impossible. Even if the seeds are from the same two parents - which is not always guaranteed, as pollen travels - you could end up with multiple phenotypes which have different nutritional needs; also, one plant's growth pattern might mean that it'll end up blocking a significant portion of the other plant's light. Plus, diseases, insect infestations, etc. can spread from one plant to another much easier if they are both in the same container.

If one is growing in relatively large containers (e.g., 50+ gallons), placing multiple plants in one container is somewhat understandable. Otherwise, not so much.

I don't think it averages out to 50% males. One staminate ("male") cannabis plant can end up pollinating a great many female plants. Some percentage more than the absolute minimum would seem to be good, both for the sake of diversity and to guard against one or a very small number of male plants being eaten/destroyed before they could release their pollen, so evolution would have favored groups that produced slightly more than that actual minimum, I assume.

Dutch Passion had this to say about the M:F ratio (which might be of some small help to you, IDK), some years back. I'm not sure (don't currently know where my copy of the original text is), but I think someone added their comments to it...

"Feminised Cannabis Seeds"
Courtesy of Dutch Passion

In November 1998 we introduced our "Female Cannabis Seed". We did this after our own experiments showed that from female cannabis seed, we acquired almost 100% female off-spring.

In the meantime we are six months further on. We have received a lot of feed-back from our customers. The reactions are mostly positive! Clients have successfully produced almost 100% female off-spring. However there have been reactions from customers who found a few hermaphrodites or males plants.

Apparently environmental influences affect the sex of the female cannabis seeds as well. Because of the fact that Female marijuana seeds do not grow into female marijuana plants under all circumstances. Thus we changed the name from "Female Cannabis Seeds" into "Feminised Cannabis Seeds".

From literature and from our own findings it appears that the growth of a male or a female cannabis plant from marijunaa seed, except for the predisposition in the gender chromosomes, also depends on various environmental factors. Not only the origination of entirely male or female marijuana plants is partly affected by these environmental factors, the number of male and female cannabis flowers on a hermaphrodite plant is affected as well.

The environmental factors that influence the sex of the cannabis plant (or the flower in the case of hermaphrodites), are among other things:

The quantity of nitrogen and potassium of the seedbed.
Humidity and moistness of the seedbed.
Level of temperatures.
Colour of the light used.
Length of daylight.

Stress, any form of stress, makes that more male individuals will originate from seed. Even the taking of cuttings from female cannabis plants may produce male or hermaphrodite cuttings.

To optimise the result, changes in one or more of the above-mentioned environmental factors for a certain period during marijuana growth, may be applied. During this time these environmental factors will deviate from the standard growing system for maximum harvest and quality, as described in nursery literature. The desired change(s) in the environmental factor(s) are started from the moment that the marijuana seedling has three pairs of real leaves (not counting the seed-lobes). This is the moment that male and/or female predisposition in florescence is being formed. After approximately two weeks the standard growing system can be reconverted to.

Of the 5 above-mentioned environmental factors the first three are the most practical:

Level of nitrogen and potassium of the seedbed: A heightening of the standard level of nitrogen makes for more female cannabis plants originating from the weed seeds. A lowering of the nitrogen level shows more male cannabis plants. A heightening of the level of potassium tends to show more male marijuana plants, while a lowering of the potassium level shows more female marijuana plants. A combination of a higher nitrogen level for the period of a week or two and a lowering of the potassium level is recommended.

Humidity and moistness of the seedbed: a higher humidity makes for an increase in the number of female cannabis plants from weed seed, a lowering for an increase in male cannabis plants. The same is valid for the moistness of the seedbed.

Level of temperatures: lower temperatures make for a larger number of female marijuana plants, higher temperatures for more male marijuana plants.

Colour of light: more blue light makes for female cannabis plants from seed, more red light makes for more male cannabis plants.

Hours of daylight: few hours of daylight (e.g. 14 hours) makes for more female individuals, a long day (e.g. 18 hours) makes for more male cannabis plants.

Now let me just make a few adjustments here to this. You can do whatever you want to your cannabis plants in seedling stage and early vegetative stage of growth and it will not effect your final male to female ratios. The time when things should be near perfect is in or around the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth.

This is the CRITICAL TIME for getting those female ratios up and up. I realized this clearly when noticing how some cannabis plants hermed because of problems that occurred around this period of the cannabis plants development. If the problems occurred before this time - no herms. So for this reason I surmised that this is when the crucial gender selection is made by the marijuana plant.

Now I believe that the genders are set in the weed seed however the environment has a massive impact on how this is expressed in the final phenotypic expression of the cannabis plants gender. There are probably many genes that govern this, however lets get into how to up these female ratios.

The Italian Society of Agricultural Genetics agrees the sexual differentiation of cannabis is strongly influenced by environmental factors such as temperature and photoperiod. Anomalies also occur in floral development like the presence of reproductive structures of the opposite sex, or the development of bisexual inflorescences (monoecious phenotype).

At the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth make sure that your marijuana plants are free from stress. No pests attacks, no fungi attacks, no mold, no irregular photoperiod, not underwatered, not overwatered, not pruned or topped, a cannabis friendly soil mix, not recently transplanted, no small pots. If have these basic growing conditions under control then we can move onto the real forces of female production from standard weed seeds.

N-P-K and nutrients. What this simply boils down to is that you have the right nutrients present in the right ratios. A nutrient formulation that has roughly equal parts N, P and K is great but if the P levels go up or the N levels go down you are starting to look at a flowering type food for cannabis. If you do this then your odds of producing mostly females is greatly decreased. Make sure that you get those N, P and K levels to almost run from higher to lower amounts from N to P and K.

I have noticed that equal portions of N to P an K can help with the female ratios but the higher N is certainly more helpful. So around the 3rd of 4th week of growth make sure that the ratios are good and that P or K has not gone above the N and P or else more males will occur. Obviously this means to avoid overfeeding your cannabis plants around this time too.

Never let your medium dry out completely around the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative marijuana growth. If you make sure to water occasionally, but not to overwater your cannabis plants, you will get those female ratios on the up and up. Overwatering or drying out of the medium will only produce more males. For consistent results in getting more females keeps those mediums moist.

Humidity. Now this is the tricky one. High humidity levels only promote fungi and mold development and lowering humidity levels is the way to cure most of this rot but by keeping those humidity levels up in or around the 70% relative humidity factor will help to produce more females. If you have a low humidity grow room then you should get to hold of a humidifier. Now high humidity levels like 70% RH cause the medium to dry out a lot quicker so you got to keep this under control too. Keep those mediums moist and those rH levels at 70%. This will help to improve those female to male ratios. Again, getting them on the up and up.

If you run the 24/0 photoperiod then do not allow those temps to go anywhere above 85°F unless you have an equatorial strain. 75°F is the best but going a little lower is not a problem for helping those female ratios. If you can get in at around 65°F then those females are going to be popping up all over the place. The problem with this is that some growers like to use the 18/6 photoperiod and when the lights are off the temps drop from around 65°F to 50°F and even less. Try not to be below 55°F because this has the adverse effect on the plants producing more males than females. Again between 65°F and 75°F is where you want to be during the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth, the preference being 70°F.

Invest in a MH Light for vegetative growth. Dump the HPS bulb for flowering later. I have noticed that HPS lighting during vegetative growth simply sends those males to female ratios all over the place. With MH lamps the females are everywhere. Invest in some MH HID lights. It makes all the difference in getting those females to show more often. This is worth repeating! MH Bulbs produce more females under optimal conditions especially if they are present during the 3rd and 4th week of vegetative growth. Surprising enough you can start seedlings under HPS and it will not have an effect on those female ratios. Again the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth is what is important here.

No stress during the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth. That is all there is to it. If you got your garden growing in optimal conditions without marijuana plant stress then the impressive 90% to 95% females start to emerge from standard cannabis seed packs. I find that topping is best done at the second to third week of vegetative growth but that this is a little stressful and can lead to those female ratios dropping again. Avoid topping or pruning if you are looking to up the female count.
 
TorturedSoul said:
I wouldn't put more than one plant in each container, either. If you later decide to remove one, untangling the roots may be impossible. Even if the seeds are from the same two parents - which is not always guaranteed, as pollen travels - you could end up with multiple phenotypes which have different nutritional needs; also, one plant's growth pattern might mean that it'll end up blocking a significant portion of the other plant's light. Plus, diseases, insect infestations, etc. can spread from one plant to another much easier if they are both in the same container.

If one is growing in relatively large containers (e.g., 50+ gallons), placing multiple plants in one container is somewhat understandable. Otherwise, not so much.

I don't think it averages out to 50% males. One staminate ("male") cannabis plant can end up pollinating a great many female plants. Some percentage more than the absolute minimum would seem to be good, both for the sake of diversity and to guard against one or a very small number of male plants being eaten/destroyed before they could release their pollen, so evolution would have favored groups that produced slightly more than that actual minimum, I assume.

Dutch Passion had this to say about the M:F ratio (which might be of some small help to you, IDK), some years back. I'm not sure (don't currently know where my copy of the original text is), but I think someone added their comments to it...

"Feminised Cannabis Seeds"
Courtesy of Dutch Passion

In November 1998 we introduced our "Female Cannabis Seed". We did this after our own experiments showed that from female cannabis seed, we acquired almost 100% female off-spring.

In the meantime we are six months further on. We have received a lot of feed-back from our customers. The reactions are mostly positive! Clients have successfully produced almost 100% female off-spring. However there have been reactions from customers who found a few hermaphrodites or males plants.

Apparently environmental influences affect the sex of the female cannabis seeds as well. Because of the fact that Female marijuana seeds do not grow into female marijuana plants under all circumstances. Thus we changed the name from "Female Cannabis Seeds" into "Feminised Cannabis Seeds".

From literature and from our own findings it appears that the growth of a male or a female cannabis plant from marijunaa seed, except for the predisposition in the gender chromosomes, also depends on various environmental factors. Not only the origination of entirely male or female marijuana plants is partly affected by these environmental factors, the number of male and female cannabis flowers on a hermaphrodite plant is affected as well.

The environmental factors that influence the sex of the cannabis plant (or the flower in the case of hermaphrodites), are among other things:

The quantity of nitrogen and potassium of the seedbed.
Humidity and moistness of the seedbed.
Level of temperatures.
Colour of the light used.
Length of daylight.

Stress, any form of stress, makes that more male individuals will originate from seed. Even the taking of cuttings from female cannabis plants may produce male or hermaphrodite cuttings.

To optimise the result, changes in one or more of the above-mentioned environmental factors for a certain period during marijuana growth, may be applied. During this time these environmental factors will deviate from the standard growing system for maximum harvest and quality, as described in nursery literature. The desired change(s) in the environmental factor(s) are started from the moment that the marijuana seedling has three pairs of real leaves (not counting the seed-lobes). This is the moment that male and/or female predisposition in florescence is being formed. After approximately two weeks the standard growing system can be reconverted to.

Of the 5 above-mentioned environmental factors the first three are the most practical:

Level of nitrogen and potassium of the seedbed: A heightening of the standard level of nitrogen makes for more female cannabis plants originating from the weed seeds. A lowering of the nitrogen level shows more male cannabis plants. A heightening of the level of potassium tends to show more male marijuana plants, while a lowering of the potassium level shows more female marijuana plants. A combination of a higher nitrogen level for the period of a week or two and a lowering of the potassium level is recommended.

Humidity and moistness of the seedbed: a higher humidity makes for an increase in the number of female cannabis plants from weed seed, a lowering for an increase in male cannabis plants. The same is valid for the moistness of the seedbed.

Level of temperatures: lower temperatures make for a larger number of female marijuana plants, higher temperatures for more male marijuana plants.

Colour of light: more blue light makes for female cannabis plants from seed, more red light makes for more male cannabis plants.

Hours of daylight: few hours of daylight (e.g. 14 hours) makes for more female individuals, a long day (e.g. 18 hours) makes for more male cannabis plants.

Now let me just make a few adjustments here to this. You can do whatever you want to your cannabis plants in seedling stage and early vegetative stage of growth and it will not effect your final male to female ratios. The time when things should be near perfect is in or around the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth.

This is the CRITICAL TIME for getting those female ratios up and up. I realized this clearly when noticing how some cannabis plants hermed because of problems that occurred around this period of the cannabis plants development. If the problems occurred before this time - no herms. So for this reason I surmised that this is when the crucial gender selection is made by the marijuana plant.

Now I believe that the genders are set in the weed seed however the environment has a massive impact on how this is expressed in the final phenotypic expression of the cannabis plants gender. There are probably many genes that govern this, however lets get into how to up these female ratios.

The Italian Society of Agricultural Genetics agrees the sexual differentiation of cannabis is strongly influenced by environmental factors such as temperature and photoperiod. Anomalies also occur in floral development like the presence of reproductive structures of the opposite sex, or the development of bisexual inflorescences (monoecious phenotype).

At the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth make sure that your marijuana plants are free from stress. No pests attacks, no fungi attacks, no mold, no irregular photoperiod, not underwatered, not overwatered, not pruned or topped, a cannabis friendly soil mix, not recently transplanted, no small pots. If have these basic growing conditions under control then we can move onto the real forces of female production from standard weed seeds.

N-P-K and nutrients. What this simply boils down to is that you have the right nutrients present in the right ratios. A nutrient formulation that has roughly equal parts N, P and K is great but if the P levels go up or the N levels go down you are starting to look at a flowering type food for cannabis. If you do this then your odds of producing mostly females is greatly decreased. Make sure that you get those N, P and K levels to almost run from higher to lower amounts from N to P and K.

I have noticed that equal portions of N to P an K can help with the female ratios but the higher N is certainly more helpful. So around the 3rd of 4th week of growth make sure that the ratios are good and that P or K has not gone above the N and P or else more males will occur. Obviously this means to avoid overfeeding your cannabis plants around this time too.

Never let your medium dry out completely around the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative marijuana growth. If you make sure to water occasionally, but not to overwater your cannabis plants, you will get those female ratios on the up and up. Overwatering or drying out of the medium will only produce more males. For consistent results in getting more females keeps those mediums moist.

Humidity. Now this is the tricky one. High humidity levels only promote fungi and mold development and lowering humidity levels is the way to cure most of this rot but by keeping those humidity levels up in or around the 70% relative humidity factor will help to produce more females. If you have a low humidity grow room then you should get to hold of a humidifier. Now high humidity levels like 70% RH cause the medium to dry out a lot quicker so you got to keep this under control too. Keep those mediums moist and those rH levels at 70%. This will help to improve those female to male ratios. Again, getting them on the up and up.

If you run the 24/0 photoperiod then do not allow those temps to go anywhere above 85°F unless you have an equatorial strain. 75°F is the best but going a little lower is not a problem for helping those female ratios. If you can get in at around 65°F then those females are going to be popping up all over the place. The problem with this is that some growers like to use the 18/6 photoperiod and when the lights are off the temps drop from around 65°F to 50°F and even less. Try not to be below 55°F because this has the adverse effect on the plants producing more males than females. Again between 65°F and 75°F is where you want to be during the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth, the preference being 70°F.

Invest in a MH Light for vegetative growth. Dump the HPS bulb for flowering later. I have noticed that HPS lighting during vegetative growth simply sends those males to female ratios all over the place. With MH lamps the females are everywhere. Invest in some MH HID lights. It makes all the difference in getting those females to show more often. This is worth repeating! MH Bulbs produce more females under optimal conditions especially if they are present during the 3rd and 4th week of vegetative growth. Surprising enough you can start seedlings under HPS and it will not have an effect on those female ratios. Again the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth is what is important here.

No stress during the 3rd to 4th week of vegetative growth. That is all there is to it. If you got your garden growing in optimal conditions without marijuana plant stress then the impressive 90% to 95% females start to emerge from standard cannabis seed packs. I find that topping is best done at the second to third week of vegetative growth but that this is a little stressful and can lead to those female ratios dropping again. Avoid topping or pruning if you are looking to up the female count.
Click to expand...
@TorturedSoul Thanks. There is a lot of information here. If my regular seeds are XY even in optimized conditions, I would assume that they will be male plants. From basic genetics. This should be about 50/50. With humans there is a slight edge for females given poorer genetics for males. Not sure how it works out in plants. I could be wrong, but I have not heard otherwise. If I buy feminized seeds and do not keep them optimized, they can herm and essentially look like a male plant. Breeders should try to stabilize genetics so it is difficult to herm, even under some of the non-ideal conditions you mentioned, but you never know. At this point I plan on growing all regular seeds in one gallon buckets. I will attempt to clone everything and flower out clones. Otherwise I will look for pre-flowers and try to determine male female and do culling or move males to another room. I will transplant females to larger containers. I try to keep my grow ideal but it is often difficult, especially humidity and temperature this time of the year. Thanks again for reply
 
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