Feminizing Your Marijuana Plants
So, you’ve got a couple of successful Cannabis grows under your belt; you’ve struggled and solved issues, had losses and great comebacks. Now you are looking to take your grow skills to the next level, I’m not sure why you would want to take on more challenge because after all you are a stoner and challenges are tough! Anyway, somehow you have some extra free time and don’t want to spend money on seeds… there is a solution to this problem. You can grow your very own seeds, even better you can force those seeds to be feminized so that you don’t end up with 70% of your plants producing males. The sad fact is that cannabis plants produce 70% male plants and only 30% female plants.
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You Don’t Have to Buy Buy Marijuana Seeds
Having a seasons worth of cannabis grown and harvested is amazing – looking to the future and preparing for future grows is the next level of growing. Do you want your next grow to be easier? Do you want to start a grow with no upfront cash investment? This article will examine the secret of growing and sexing seeds so that you can continue a plants genetic line without paying for more seeds or having to produce clones. Even better if you grow a crop that you love because it’s strong you can breed that plant for seeds to recreate the same high THC content in another plant. Bud quality is easy to achieve by producing your own cannabis seeds.
Some of the Qualities That Can Be Bread Into Your Seeds Are:
- High bud quality
- Increases Yields
- Grow any marijuana strain
- THC Content
The first Step is Identifying the Sex of your plants
It is critical for growers to be able to examine a plant and determine that plants sex. You are looking to identify male and female marijuana plants so that they can be handled separately. Your plants will start showing their sex as they mature into the full vegetation stage.
The first signs of a plants sex will be found where the leaf meets the stock of the plant. You are looking for budlike growths which are green and white flowers in the shape of a tiny egg. These small egg like sacks are the telltale sign that a plant is male. If you were to shake one of these male organs you would find it will expel a cloud of pollen. Please don’t handle male plants in the same area as your female plants. Female plants that you are growing for their cannabis should be separated from the male plants immediately.
If you were to leave your male and female plants together or if your male plants manage to pollinate your female plants before separating them, you’ll end up with bud that contains seeds. Not the end of the world but it certainly reduces the quality of your smoke.
Around two weeks after your male plants show themselves your female plants will begin to sexually mature. You will start to see buds growing at the ends of your branches, these are the buds you are used to seeing. These tiny buds will grow up to be large resin-coated beauties that you’ll be able to smoke.
Do I want to Seed my Cannabis Plants?
If you leave your plants to do what comes naturally to them the female plants will be fertilized causing a new generation of seeds to be created. Female plants buds are affected by fertilization in several ways.
• Buds will contain seeds (the bud you smoke will contain a lot of seeds)
• Shorter time for buds to mature (Smaller harvest)
• Less potent buds (less THC)
By not seeding the plants you end up with unfertilized flowers which will grow much larger and contain a much higher percentage of THC and CBD.
What this means to you is that you need to proactively decide how many female plants you want to harvest for their flowers (buds) and how many plants you want to seed. For the plants you plant to flower normally all males need to be removed from the grow as soon as possible to avoid contamination of the female plants with pollen.
The Hard Part About Sexing Plants is Looking Between Their Legs
The hard part about sexing your plants is the fact that you’re going to have to stomach tossing away 70% of your plants. Don’t feel bad about this as your plants will produce much more bud if they aren’t fertilized. It will make up for a lot of the plant loss. You must be completely sure a plant is male before removing it from your grow. If you are unsure you should wait a few more days for the sex organs size to increase so you can make an easy call on the plant’s sex.
If you don’t want to go through the sexing process you can just let your plants pollinate and pick out the seeds as part of the harvest process…… A load of work.
Your other option and a much easier option is to buy feminize marijuana seeds. This will mean your grow will have zero male plants and you’ll have a much higher yield overall because all your plants will produce cannabis.
If you decide that you want to grow seeds and have clean bud, you’ll need to isolate one male plant and toss the rest. One male plant is all you’ll need to pollinate as many females as you like. Pick the male plant that looks best and strongest to pass on this trait to the new plants.
Force The Light Schedule
Once you isolate the male plant you will need to set its own lighting schedule. To force a male plant to produce pollen you will need to provide the plant with 12 hours of light and 12 hours of complete darkness.
As the male plant matures on Its 12-hour light cycle it will cause the plant to produce pollen which can easily be extracted. Simply place a sheet of paper under a branch and then shake the branch. You will find that a fine dust (pollen) is accumulating on the paper. Gather up the pollen and place it in an envelope which you can then keep in the freezer. Perform this task for all the plant’s branches every few days until the plant stops producing. If you keep the pollen in the freezer it will remain fresh and ready to use at any time.
While you’ve been collecting pollen, your female cannabis has remained on a 12-hour on, 12-hour off light cycle. Continue with this light process until you decide that your plants are large enough to flower.
At this point, you’ll need to decide how many female plants you want to seed and which of your plants that you want to flower. Take a close look at your female plants for characteristics that you like and select the female cannabis plants you are going to pollinate.
Knocking Up Your Plants
Pollination must be completed very carefully. To avoid contamination of your other females, remove the plants you wish to pollinate before you begin. Extract about a teaspoon of pollen from your envelope which has been kept in the freezer and place it in a small bowl. Now use a small paint brush to liberally coat the plant(s) cola making sure to get pollen all over the top of the cola.
Change the Light Schedule
Now that you’ve impregnated your female cannabis(s) you should keep the plant on a 12-hour on, 12-hour off light cycle. You’ll need to keep the impregnated females separate from your other females for 4 or 5 days. After this period there is no longer an issue with contaminating your other females, so the plants can be put back together.
Keep watch on your pollinated female(s), I also mark pollinated females, so they can’t be lost in a plant shuffle. feminize marijuana seeds are ready for harvest when they change from green to a sort of brown color. Do not harvest your seeds early or they will not be viable.
Pick out the seeds from the buds with your fingers or use tweezers if you have the manual dexterity. Store these seeds in a freezer bag. Be sure to label the bag with the strain and date and then simply put it in the freezer. Your seeds will remain in suspended animation almost indefinable. If you want to germinate some seeds just remove them from the freezer and begin the normal germination process.
How Can Making Seeds Get Even Better?
So, you’ve done it, you’re a champ… you’ve gone from being a bewildered newbie to a seasoned cannabis grower. Congratulations, that’s a feat. Then you took it farther by growing your own seeds, you’re a superstar! But there is one issue nagging at you. The issue is how inefficient it is growing 70% males when all you want at this point is females. Why take the time to tend to those plants just to toss them in the composter?
Feminizing Seeds, The Better Way
If you pick up a handful of seeds and examine them as closely as possible there is still no easy way to determine which seed will be male and which female. There is also no way to change a seed from one sex to the other so how pray tell can you increase the odds in your favor for more female cannabis? Well, there are several techniques to achieve this goal and we are going to discuss the most common and successful option.
Before We Get into Feminization There is an Easier Way
We are about to get into some next level growing technique and with that comes a learning curve which could cost you lost plants. It’s more than reasonable to expect the average person to be able to achieve good results so don’t be worried. I just want to give you another option and that’s again buying the seeds online. You can buy feminize marijuana seeds from reputable companies like Cropkingseeds.com or ilovegrowingmarijuana.com. Either of these companies will provide you with many feminized strain options. I’ve tested seeds from both companies and have had a 100% success rate with both feminization and germination.
If you want to buy cannabis seeds you don’t need to worry. You can order from the two companies I mentioned because both guarantee delivery. In all my years of growing, I’ve never had a pack of seeds gets confiscated in the mail. Worry not marijuana grower, you can safely order seeds to your home!
So, You Still Want to Grow Feminized Seeds
Good for you, sticking in to want to learn how to do it on your own. I think I lose a lot of people with that buy your feminized seeds online option. But you’re still here so either you really want to know how to do it or you are cheap like me and can’t see paying $50 bucks for a few seeds that you can grow for free.
So here we go. I know of three types of feminization:
• silver thiosulfate
• colloidal silver method
• rodelization method
Using any one of these techniques correctly will yield mostly female cannabis plants in the end.
The newest option is the Silver Thiosulfate Solution treatment or STS for short. This procedure was used to make the first commercially viable feminized seeds but now is commonplace because it’s very effective and doesn’t require you to be an expert to successfully complete the process.
Silver Thiosulfate: What the heck is that?
First off, its pronounced “so-di-um thi-o-sul-phate” and it’s a chemical commonly used in black and white photography as a fixer to dissolve unexposed silver halides. Think of halides as the tiny pixels of a photographic image on a computer.
The next chemical used in the STS process is silver nitrate. This again is a chemical used in black and white photography.
The STS Process Step 1 (preparing stock solutions)
The STS solutions are mixed separately and kept that way until you are ready to use it. The stock solutions are made of two parts (A and B). Part A is always mixed into part B while stirring rapidly. Only use distilled water or reverse osmosis treated water to avoid contaminants that will cause precipitates to from.
Also, these by no means are dangerous chemicals but they are caustic, so gloves are a must have to protect your skin from burns and staining.
Part A: .5-gram silver nitrate stirred into 500ml distilled water
Part B: 2.5 grams sodium thiosulfate (anhydrous) stirred into 500ml distilled water
Silver nitrate will dissolve in the water in about 15 seconds, but the sodium thiosulfate will take about 45 seconds to completely dissolve. Those are your two base solutions.
Stock solutions are diluted down to a ratio of 1:9 to create the working solution. For example, 100 ml of stick STS is added to 900 ml of distilled water. This silver spray mixture is then sprayed on to the surfaces of the plant you have selected to perform your sex change on. Discard any unused solution down the drain and flush well with water.
Now, What Happens?
To be honest you aren’t going to like this next part. It’s scary, you are going to feel like you are about to lose the treated plant within a few days. The plant will show such signs of stress almost immediately. Your leaves are going to brown up like I said scary. After about 5 days of this stressed condition, your plant will start showing signs that it is coming around again. Over the next 30 days, the plant will continue and then finish its transition from female to male. At this time, you should be able to shake the newly male plant over your female plants to release its pollen. Now it gets a little complicated here. Since this plant started its life as a female plant it still produces female pollen. After just a few weeks your fertilized female plants will start producing beautiful female seeds of plenty.
I know that the STS process sounds simple enough, but I wouldn’t expect that you’ll be successful the first time. It isn’t a perfect science and changing the sex of your plant using harsh chemicals can lead to your plant’s demise. The plant that you treated with the STS process should be tossed out once you have used it to pollinate your other plants. The pollen is safe but plant mater from that plant should not be ingested in any way.
Just one last reminder that you can purchase feminized seeds in just about any strain from: