Fun with Octopots: The Seed Maker
Here’s a fun trick that has worked for me a few times now. If you want to do a quick and easy small seed run, consider this technique. It sounds more complicated than it is in practice.
If you look closely (zoom in) at the pic below you will notice:
- There are three young plants with similar structure in this octopup.
- One is much taller than the others, that is a STS reversed male.
- One is much smaller than the others, she is a flowering fem.
- The third is a middle-sized child a bit deeper into fem efflorescence.
The big male is just about to drop a nice batch of potent pollen, dusting the younger girls with the lusty vigor normally associated with hot sex.
In six weeks or so I have reason to believe that I’ll be harvesting 50-100 healthy Frankenstein’s Daughter IBL seeds with little more fuss and bother than topping off the auto filler Rez a time or two.
Sound interesting? Here are the tricks of the trade.
- Take three cuttings from any healthy female plant in veg according to this schedule: On Day 1 take a large cut and get it started rooting. On Day 14 take another healthy cut & root it. Emphasize health rather than size. On day 21 take the third sister cut, same size as the second, same protocol.
- As soon as roots are spotted on each clone, transplant it to a transparent 8oz speed cup. Use your favorite “Seedling” mix of nutes at half strength judiciously. Bottom water preferred, RhizoTonic, and SuperThrive are my fav additions. Set your lights to veg for 24/0 daytime, 400-600 PPFD.
- Once you see roots actually beginning to circle the bottom of each speed cup, transplant that plant into a single octopot. Fill the Octo Rez half way with an early flowering nute mix and set the lights for 12/12 flowering, 600-900 PPFD…
- As soon as you see the first sign of pistils on the larger “Day One” male-to-be, begin a normal STS or CS reversal. Mask the female plants as you spray, or use a brush to dose individual branches on the reversal male. Spray every four days until you see male flowers.
Then you can just sit back and watch the show. The timing steps will cause the girls to begin flowering a little while before the big boy starts puffing his dust storm of fresh pollen at the girls. Keep feeding and lights as you normally would for flower all the way to harvest. If you have some secret sauce nute mix for seed building use it now.
If you did everything right, six weeks later you’ll be looking at these.
The Cherry on Top: if you continued to grow out the original “mother” plant for bud after you took these cuts, and your timing was right, that “Mom” plant should be delivering a bud harvest for you to sample as your new seeds are beginning to ripen. You get the smoke and the seeds! I have had that pleasure and it is the Sweetness! lol
YMMV, but I’ve had good luck with this and thought it was worth sharing.
Cheers,
-Grouchy 
PS, For those who are interested in such things: Starting with a known female removes any uncertainty as to the sex of the cuts. So you can start as soon as the Mom shows, My theory is that the timing of the cuts taken will result in a pollen drop beginning when the two fems are in early and mid flowering stretch. The following two or three weeks of full blown dusting should cover the most important window for successful pollination. Even small fems can deliver plenty of seeds, I’ve pulled over 50 seeds from this lady.
