Nice photo… Any time CS fails to reverse a female plant the batch was ran at a higher voltage and made to quick.
The best silver and low voltage is very important. I would rather use STS but it caused to much outrage in the community. Also watch out buying STS because it’s used to make counterfeit money.
I prefer STS… I have a life, I dont want to keep spraying CS day after day after day after day…
That’s Funny. No offense but you guys scare me! It is not you it’s just my ignorance on the subject. When everything is legal hopefully everybody can chuck pollen and perfect traits in a more wholesome manner. Experimentation is important also of course.
Do you make your CS?
Works great just follow the instructions. In short, isolate 1 female and follow the directions. Because once that shemale starts producing pollen you want to catch it and spread pollen on your other isolated females you want feminized. Lady Pollan page has very good instructions available. Easy Peasy…
yup… I tarnished a few coins just for CS. Thats the other issue…
Check out silver wire for glassblowing. Ima get myself some and make some fem beans for friends
These guys are great the best of all Worlds autos and feminized. I met one of the breeders a couple years ago great guy! All they breed is auto feminized.
Autos r for smokers, fems for gardening consumers, regs for growers. Fems is a good way to avoid selection and time wasted. Most gardeners who eat their own vegetables aren’t breeders and most pot smokers aren’t growers. To each his own but you must admit feminized seeds have brought a lot of new growers onto the scene. They are all here to stay, to each his own, but as a grower/gardener I like regs. Sometimes a fem or 2 and have only grown 2 auto’s as guerrilla grows. Variety is the spice of life!
I do buy feminized seeds from time to time, but I prefer not to for the genetic diversity.
Same reason I don’t buy clones of clones. If you take pollen from a stress-hermed plant and fertilize a female, you’re still playing the genetic lottery, only you’ve introduced a potential hermitic trait.
Actually this is a neat article on what’s happened to the banana. We all know it’s disappearing, but did you know it’s actually the second variety we grew the shit out of?
If I find a male in my run that looks hearty, it goes outdoors until it flowers, where I can see if it bothered to make any trichomes and I can collect the pollen. Pollen can last for YEARS if stored properly, so it’s even easier to preserve certain lines. In fact I have some original Bogbubble pollen from the old OG days I still use from time to time when I feel like crossing it with something interesting. As far as I know pollen trading isn’t illegal either, so this might be another avenue we can explore as an industry. 
I use a light paintbrush to pollenate a single bud, which will produce 10-20 seeds or so, and not mess too much with the rest of the output of the plant.
I think it’s the responsibility of all breeders to diversify, particularly before the likes of Monsanto and friends take a whack at it.
I’m with CD on the “playing the lottery” aspect of feminizing seeds. Basic evolutionary theory says that if you or the environment select for a certain trait, and breed individuals exhibiting that trait, over time that trait will become more prevalent in the population of a species.
That works for preferred traits such as trichome density, THC/CBD ratios, maturation times, etc. But in feminizing, you are seeking to select (your “isolated female”) for “frequency of intersex expression”. You are intentionally selecting for a “bad” trait that you hope will never be expressed in the offspring. In doing so, you are violating the laws of evolution. Evolution will win, I am certain.
Most of the quality breeders that have been at this for a while do not feminize their seeds. I don’t really have a problem with hobby growers producing and using fems, and will even admit to being impressed with how well most fems hold up to stress in the grow diaries I’ve seen.
But the law’s the law. IF you select for “ease of intersexual expression” as a primary trait, eventually the trait will be dominant phenotypically in the population. Let’s face it, the strains that truly “never hermy” are the ones that are, by logic, never feminized. So I don’t mess with feminized seeds.
Go ahead and grow fems if you grow to smoke, and prefer to pay 2X the price for seeds rather than lose 25-40% of your seeds to culled males (I’ve never had a 50/50% female/male ratio from reg seeds, usually 70/30 or so).
But please, do not breed them, even to give away to friends. Don’t trade cuts without full disclosure they are feminized cuts. And for Godsakes, don’t feminize a fem’d mother plant…
-b420
CD, what’s your pollen storage technique? I’ve never heard of anyone keeping pollen viable for years. Weeks and months maybe, but years?
-b420
One last point on feminized seeds: you cannot “self” an elite clone and replicate it. I see this all the time on the feminized seeds lists, elite clone-only varieties offered as fem’d seed. It is a fraud foisted upon growers by unethical seed mongers.
Selfing a clone will replicate its genotype, in a general way, but will not necessarily replicate its phenotype, i.e. its physical characteristics. That’s because of genetic recombination after meiosis of the germ cells in the pollen and ovule - even if coming from the same individual. You’ll have the same likelihood of growing a plant that looks like the elite clone mother as you will growing a plant that looks like one of the thousand other non-elite brothers and sisters of the mother that you never saw.
If the clone is a perfect Lego castle, and you want a castle just like it, all selfing will do is get you a box of Legos. You’ll have all the building blocks you need, but you’ll still have to build the castle…
-b420
But please, do not breed them, even to give away to friends.
… so even though I have a drop-dead amazing Wreckage from a feminized seed, using it as breeding stock is a big no-no?
If you had a beautiful, drop-dead golden retriever that was the perfect dog in every way, but you knew its mother had suffered from daily severe epileptic seizures before dying 10 years early, would you breed that dog? I believe its irresponsible to do so, especially if you pass those genetics back into the community of dog breeders by selling or giving away the puppies.
As a breeder, you have a responsibility to maintain and improve the breed, whether its dogs or cannabis. Selecting for traits that increase the likelihood of growing seedy self-pollenated weed with attenuated potency is not improving the breed, IMO. Clone your plant, and enjoy it. Just don’t breed it.
Femmed or selfed look the same to me. GG4 was the last S1 I popped, and it does look like GG4 from the structure standpoint, as well as other femmed cultivars I’ve run over the years. If theres a phenotype difference between the two its slight.
I personally dont like to run femmed seeds, I prefer clones over S1’s. In fact I have no femmed cultivars in my nursery or any of the gardens.
In some cases femmed seeds is a time saving tool. But that might be a thing of the past Steep Hill GenKits are available in my area, you can ID male seedlings from first leaf.
Interesting parallel, with dogs, breeding is done with 2-4 year olds, and often traits as you have pointed out will show up in an older dog that has already produced 2 generations of progeny. Fortunately with cannabis the mother plants natural life cycle is complete before the progeny are grown out, and we can easily terminate the ‘bloodline’ before it contaminates the gene pool? While there will always be scammers and profiteers who get into the seed game. I believe feminized seeds have a place in the end user garden or production sites, personally. But breeding fems seeds and reversing clones have brought some awesome herb to the hungry masses, so it all comes down to personal ethics. That can be hard to come by in the weed biz these days. Given time the cream rises to the top and the crap gets binned, but I don’t think the real cannabis heirlooms nor the breeders who protect them are going to be harmed by multi-hybrid-hermie-zombie apocalypse that is feminized cannabis seeds.
Several problems with fem seeds IMO. One is that regardless of what many Amsterdam breeders say and what many bathtub grow ‘experts’ think, we are drastically changing the global Cannabis genetics available by the rampant creation and proliferation of fem seeds. Its tragic, really, but when Clarke wrote his book on MJ Botany many years ago, he stated that the general genetic ratio of females to males in Cannabis was already 60:40 due to fem seeds and the fact that herms tend to beget more herms. Even if you force a herm and mate it to a female, you are still altering the genetic outcome by selection and being able to herm the ‘father’. Likely the female:male ratio is even higher now than when Clarke’s book came out. That rings alarm bells for me.
Sadly in a recent Strain Hunter video that I saw, Arjan stated that he wants to see all the poor farmers of the world plant all feminized seeds. Why is that? He claims it is so they can grow more bud and not have to cull the males. I say that they will be forced to BUY more seeds from Amsterdam breeders like GH. With all females and no males, they cannot reproduce good breeding stock in later generation seeds. If they do not clone the original plants that is. Cloning has created time locked genetic strains, basically that can last forever, or at least forever in terms of one human’s lifetime. Genetics do drift, even in clones, over long periods of time. But if you look at one of my apple trees on my property here, it is a Gravenstein. That variety was first grafted in the 16th century in Holland, and (I believe) is the oldest apple variety known to exist today. I still produces one of the best apples for single variety cider that there is. It is not a good keeper though. Its really old though. Not the tree… the clone.
So… I am a landrace grower for the most part. I do grow newer stains from clones from time to time (like GDP), but for breeding I only breed landraces to try to preserve the original genetics. I do not produce fem seeds, and I cull all herms. Call me old school. I grow males. I do not sell seeds though, and I grow only for my own smoke and likes, and I trade seeds with some old friends around the world that want to preserve some of these old land race lines. They are all going extinct from all the new genetics. We are breeding one giant Auto-North-Super-Haze-Purple-OG-Lemon-Skunk-Widow strain that is merging more of the same genetics into strains every year. If every clone out there is a cousin, we are not going to have much in the way of genetic variability in the future. The strains will also be loaded with heavy herming genetics (or, from what I see, they already are and the future is already here now).
As some recent breeders have told me in person, they are not breeding to preserve the lines, or the genetics. They are breeding to make money by selling seeds to a market that wants an instant auto flowering female plant ready to harvest in 10 weeks that gets them as stoned as possible with as much THC as possible. The landrace genetics and terpens and variations all get thrown out in the race for Cannabis Cup winners with super buds and mega highs.
Well said Big Sur. I agree that the focus of 95% of seed mongers, and the seed crossers posing as breeders that supply them, seems entirely on combining poly-hybrid indica-doms with faddish names to create new multi-poly-hybrid indica-doms with newer faddish names and photogenic frosty buds. This is marketing, not breeding.
Legal state dispensary buds now regularly test at 25-28% THC. Given that cannabis concentrates are widely available at 70-80% THC, why would any breeder be devoting years of his life to create a 30% strain? The focus needs to shift from potency to cannabinoid and terpene ratios. It’s already happening with the smartest breeders. They are looking to create wine rather than grain alcohol.
The retail consumer bud market, which the retail seed market reflects, is focused on a very narrow customer demographic, basically the young urban male stoner. I think as the legal market grows and matures, producers will differentiate their products to appeal to different and expanding customer segments, and breeders that can address those segments will be rewarded. Heritage strains and landrace strains seem like obvious areas for growth, as well as a whole commercial class of true-breeding or at least proven hybrid strains which have their genetic provenance and endowments extensively catalogued for commercial growers and breeders.
Gravensteins eh? We should have an IPA at the Barlow sometime. Like to hear more about your landrace projects…
-b420