Feminized Seeds , Whats Your thoughts!?

Ok yeah man, i hear you. Those are the only femmed auto seeds i got, cos’ GG4 is a clone (so i’ve heard, LOL) so… yeah. I like regular better.

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I buy a ton of auto fem seeds for a fairly cheap price and have never once had a problem with hermie seeds :stuck_out_tongue: I think the selection and quality of fem seeds has improved in recent years aswell.

To be honest… Despite my unlikeing of feminized seeds, I must say that this just ended run that I had to do with femmed (as the growshop here had no regs) gave me not one seed… And I’m sure not a too delicate one with the girls… I open tent during darktime to take pics, to look at …I had a lightleak from a air intake the first 2 weeks of 12/12… Plenty of reasons to herm out…
So… I have to admit that femmed seeds are much better than I remembered…
D_S

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I have used fem seeds about 5 or 6 times over the past few years. I purchased them primarily because some breeders only offer
feminized seeds.
I was hearing good things about Dinafem’s version of White Widow. So I bought a ten pack.
I liked it very much. I had no problems whatsoever. Subsequently, I tried additional fem seeds. Never any difficulties with any of them.
However, I have never tried to make seeds with any feminized flowers, so I have no experience in that regard.

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Feminized seed that is reversed with chemicals has no greater chance of herming than traditional seed. Reversing it does not affect its genetics Therefor you are not selecting for an intersexed trait in the genetic line.

Feminized seeds can be weak or not. The issue with most breeders is that they cross through individual plants. They should be using populations of individuals to breed with. Cross 50 females to 50 reversed females instead of one reversed plant for however female seed plants. Or, worse yet, selfing an individual. However selfing individuals, then screening and outcrossing with the resulting seed is a legitimate technique and can be used to screen out deleterious alleles from the line before outcrossing an elite lineage/clone.

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Thats a great idea. I have long thought the same thing about a seed depository like the Svalbard vault for Cannabis https://www.croptrust.org/our-work/svalbard-global-seed-vault/

This is wrong. You are selecting for intersexual traits by the very nature of the breeding program: any females who don’t show intersex trait when splashed with STS will be culled. Intersexual expression is a REQUIREMENT of parent stock used in a feminized breeding program. To avoid redundacy, my full argument is here.

-b420

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We are having simultaneous arguments ha ha so this is just copied from the other thread:

I can see what you are saying about selecting for intersexed plants. However most, if not all Cannabis is susceptible to sex switching when triggered with certain chemicals (silver, gibberellin, ect). So because of this ubiquity you are not really selecting for the trait by performing this. On the other hand if you are using seed from natural hermies or using weak stressors to induce feminized seed (light stress overmaturation (Soma rodelization method), then yes you are selecting for a natural tendency to herm.

Furthermore any proper breeder should be screening lines based on quality control tests of seedlots for any natural monecious tendencies.

I will add though, that if your assertion is true, and some varieties of plants will not form viable pollen ever due to hormone distrupting chemicals, then you could select for hyper-stable dioecious plants by spraying with these chemicals and throwing out anything that doesn’t reverse. I suspect you aren’t going to have much, if any, to work with.

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Again, I believe you are implying a dichotomy in sexual expression where none exists. There are no “fully” female or male plants. Only plants whose sexual expression tendencies lie on a spectrum from fully female expression under all known stressors 99.99% of the time, to fully male expression under all known stressors 99.99% of the time, with lots of individuals falling into the middle area, where minor stressors can trigger intersexuality 50% of the time.

You may be the sort of dedicated, to the point of masochistic, breeder who throws everything he’s got at his parent stock - light stress, root binding, temperature stress, UVA stress, etc. - and only chooses the individuals that don’t herm, and then hits the hardest-to-flip individuals with STS, finds the few individuals that flip ONLY when drenched in that chemical, and then stress-tests the progeny before releasing seeds. Good on ya.

Most feminizers find an elite clone, whack it with STS, and start designing their breeder pack labels. Wham bam thank you ma’m. No testing, no population selection, no thought to the future of the strain other than “UK Cheese seeds, no males, $100/pack”. Did they breed with a 99.99% female, or a 75% female? Only future growers and breeders will know. When that next gen “elite clone from seed” is hit up with fem’d pollen from another 75% female, to create “UK Cheese x ChemDawg” (which would of course be called CheeseDawg b/c every accession is a strain to the seed mongers), well now we have an “elite clone strain” that is far more susceptible to stress herming. Allowing for a little genetic recombination to remix the recessive and dominant traits in each individual, and one could easily end up with a seed lot that has 50% of the individuals which have a 50% or greater tendency to express intersexual traits with even moderate stressors. Slippery slope, greased with money.

What I describe is not a hypothetical. It’s happening right now, with the results for sale at virtually every large seedbank out there.

-b420

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I’m not intending to imply dichotomy, perhaps I haven’t explained my position clearly. I’m just saying that reversing with hormone-disrupting chemicals is not actively selecting against those 99.9% for sure females because they are going to reverse also. Granted, if you’re going in to a breeding program with a line that’s prone to hermaphrodites, all of those will remain in the population. Screening out for monecious tendencies is a different step then sex reversal for the creation of feminized seed.

On the other points I agree. And that is still an issue with regular sex breeders as well. Releasing untested, polyhybrids, and S1 seed from clones with marketing that makes people believe they will get the Clone plant from those seeds.

I just think you are mixing your opposition to poor breeding practices with the technique of sex reversal unnecessarily.

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Perhaps. But poor breeding practices abound, and poor breeders pumping out fem’d seeds are being rewarded by the market because of this myth that using chemically-induced hermaphrodites as breeding stock has no downside. Guns don’t kill people, right? But walk into a bar full of tweaked-out gangbangers, hand them all 44s and toss a bag of Benjamins on the floor, and somebody’s gonna get hurt…

I’ve been pouring over the techs on feminization for the past few days - out of the hundreds of pages and dozens of posts on the subject, I’ve not found three sentences that address how to evaluate potential breeding stock for “natural” intersexual traits, how to identify “fully female” individuals for a feminization program. Not a single post on an effective screening program to identify and cull less than “fully female” individuals.

It’s quite clear to me why. Because no one is doing it. Why is no one doing it? Because the only “selection” involved in fem’ing elite clones, is deciding whether to do it and make $$$, or not.

Ironically, we have Prohibition to thank for delaying the apocalypse: most of these fem’d hacks go to “genetic islands” (Gorilla tents) and never have the chance to cross-breed with other populations. Most are never bred at all - and if that’s all that ever happens, I’m fine with fem’d seeds. In fact, maybe the fix is creating fem seed that produces sterile pollen only when hermaphrodized. Now there’s a worthy breeding project, IMO. One even the VCs would love (terminal fem seed!) They’ll need it when you are sowing fem’d Blue Dream by the acre, 10,000 plants at a time. Are they going to be happy with those 95% “fully female” P1s then, when a 5% herm rate equals 500 pollen-chucking plants scattered around 3 acres?

Vigorous, exclusive, and unwavering dioeciousness is the primary trait which drug cannabis must be bred for above all else - because nothing else matters if even one in 50 progeny show intersexuality. It ruins the crop. It’s insidious, because it not only renders the individual plant economically useless, it destroys all other individuals cropped with it. What we should be doing is throwing STS at all our breeding stock, and keeping only those individuals that DON’T reverse. Them’s your “full females”.

-b420

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I would say there’s a lot of other characters that are more important than pure 100% full femaleness (cannabinoid for instance).

It’s easy to screen for intersex qualities. You grow out large samples of your seed lots and evaluate the intersex frequency.

I’ve seen feminized seed lines that have not had a male involved in at least six generations with that 99.98% female rate. I understand your sex reversal selection theory, I just don’t think it really translates into reality because of the ubiquity of the reaction in the genera.

Here, here :clap:

Reminds me of star trek and the borg this argument resistence is futile hehehe

I think it depends quite simply if the breeder is orientated by money or by breeding to better his stock and future progeny. Most are init for the slippery slope greased with paper gold or btc.

The few and far between are in it for the ability and passion to create, preserve and better the progeny where possible, that takes time, space, money, and hard work with a lot of dedication.

Pretty sure most here know which camp your in Mr. Baudelaire :wink: :sunglasses:
B-420 :wink:

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The feminized seeds became a thing just as THEY started pushing the transgenderism etc agenda, like hey let’s ignore the science and reality of biological sex. THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES. Synthetic estrogen in birth control pills doesn’t break down, gets pissed out and is in the water making the frogs hermie. The frogs, cannabis, people, its all part of the plan.

I only order regular seeds and I put the keepers through stress tests to try to get them to hermie. If they hermie, they die. I kill them in front of the other plants as a deterrence.

Any frog I catch in my yard, I check its sex. If its a hermie, squish.

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Sounds like the same love I give to caterpillars.

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I only buy regular myself, but if they come for free, WTH i’ll try them, just learning now. Can’t do anything advanced like running tests… I know @Herbie can!

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I"m glad you’re repping this argument man, I get too pissed off to participate in these threads! :smiley: I’ll stay away for the benefit of the community! :smile:

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What does a hermie frog look like?

Lots of references for natural mono-sexual and asexual reproduction in the animal kingdom, and it’s the rule in the plant kingdom. In cannabis, ethylene suppression is the process used for inducing intersexuality, not estrogen.

As far as raving lunatics like Alex Jones go, I think he could use all the estrogen-laced water he can get. :bouquet:

-b420

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I think feminized seeds are great if thats what you are looking for. If the mom is solid there usually are no hermie traits present. I have had and have plenty of genetics from female seed.

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