environmental feminization

scott06

no this is not about growing up in as the only male in a house with 3 sisters...ha ha....but rather some info I gleened from Dutch Passion's site on using environmental factors to increase the number of female plants...specifically:
"From literature and our own findings it appears that the growth of a male or female plant from seed, except for the predisposition in the gender chromosomes, also depends on various environmental factors. The environmental factors that influence gender are:

• a higher nitrogen concentration will give more females.
• a higher potassium concentration will give more males.
• a higher humidity will give more females.
• a lower temperature will give more females.
• more blue light will give more females.
• Fewer hours of light will give more females.

It is important to start these changes at the three-pairs-of-leaves stage and continue for two or three weeks, before reverting to standard conditions." I have heard that stressing a plant may cause hermies but not females.Does anyone have any experience/success with these methodologies? fem seeds are awefully expensive and with limited grow space veging the useless males for a month or more before removal is inefficient. (I am sure some of the women subscribers may now chuckle at the phase "useless males")
Thoughts anyone?

videoman

Hey, thanks for posting the info. I've seen that before, and some of us believe in it, others do not.

It makes sense to me, and come from dutch passion, a well respected breeder. (they also make the mazar I love so much)
Peace

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Hobo

hmmmmmmmmm not sooo sure about that.....

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PS i am a pathological liar, and have illusions of grandeur. I post pictures of pot plants i found on the internet and i have never nor will i ever consider the cultivation of marijuana, as it is illegal.

2stoned

i belive he was once a respected breeder but alas like many many other seed bank breeders greed has taken its foothold....also you can eliminate all guess from male to female if starting with fem clones..peace az

scott06

Hi Videoman,

I planted 7 fem mazars two days ago and 4 sprouted today....I hope I do a good job and that the Mazar lives up to its rep....

Baywatch242000

How do they feminize seeds?

scott06

here is one organic at home method
http://www.420source.com/post/82

and a more chemically intence method ick! http://www.420source.com/post/21

and some ideas from wiki
[edit] Feminized seeds

It is possible to use a combination of cloning and "shocking" plants to get them to produce feminized seeds.[7] A clone will retain the same sex throughout its life, so if a female plant is cloned, its clone children will also be female, precluding reproduction.
While environmental stresses have been used to create pollen bearing male flowers on female plants- known as 'hermaphroditing' or 'hermying', this method is not preferred when creating feminized seeds; due to those plants most likely to revert to seed making being the ones which hermie soonest; hence passing on the genetic trait of instability of gender - desirable in the wild but not in cultivation.
Spraying selected leaves, branches and in cases where large amount of seed desired whole plants with colloidal silver solution has become a preferred method since the colloidal silver suppresses ethylene production in bud sites, stimulating male characteristics. Gibberellic acid has been used frequently; but is harder to find than colloidal silver, which involves nothing more than a small wall d.c. power supply and two pieces of solid silver jeweler's wire, or 99.999% silver coin. A method used by organic growers and promulgated by the famous Cannabis breeder Soma, is called 'Rodelization', or letting unpollenated female plants live several weeks longer than the normal harvest time. In such plants a hermaphroditic trait will self express in effort to continue the genetic line; the fact this method utilizes auto hermaphroditic traits which could contribute to instability in a plant's genetics is offset by grower observations that the tendency to auto-switch sex is not great in plants grown from seeds made this way, and the fact that it occurs naturally without effort on the part of the cultivator.
Another method of feminizing seeds is to get women's birth control pills which contain estrogen, grind them up and mix them with water. Soak the seeds in the water over night. Germinaate the seeds in the same solution.[citation needed]
The most common way to feminize seeds is to get a ripening banana which gives off the gas ethylene and leave it in a zip-lock bag with the seeds for fourteen days. (It increases the feminization of seeds up to 25%)

and from a seedbank I am happy with http://www.marijuana-seeds.nl/femini...ana-seeds.html
they give some hints about their process - I can see that some companies would choose to keep it semi-secret since fem seeds can cost twice as much or more - Feminized Marijuana Seeds
Feminized Marijuana seeds represent the peak in quality and genetics of marijuana seeds. The seeds are difficult to produce but deliver optimum quality and all female plants. The seeds also produce very stable plants.
The evolution of seed production is apparent in these selections. Bred to produce 99.9% female "seed clones". These strains have proven themselves winners a thousand times over with discerning cultivators. Very well suited for indoor organic cultivation.
To produce the feminized Marijuana seeds, we start with selected female clones. Under standard conditions these female clones do not produce any male flowers. By the method we found, we are able to have these female clones produce abundant male flowers and pollen. The pollen thus produced we use for the production of our "feminized" seeds.

videoman

That was an excellent article, it's good to read that method again.
I'd like to try this someday.
Peace

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