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