male to female ratio!

Alabama · 07-22-2002, 07:28 AM

So I went out to my grow last Sat and it's been perfect growing weather and I've apparently got the right nutes (Miracle Gro Azalea mix with 30% N for phat veggin') going because the plants look great. I started with 32 transplanted seedlings (about a month old, a mixture of sativas and indicas with avariety of genetics) placed in prepared soil on a south facing hill surrounded by kudzu back in early May. After culling a few runts and accidentally breaking one (I klutzed out), the number is down to 26 spread over 7 plots and their heights range from about 4.5 feet to 7 feet. They are bushy with lots of healthy branching, very little bug damage, and healthy leaves. All that would be enough for me to rejoice at this point in the growing season, but to my delight they also have started showing their sex almost overnight. Of the 26 plants, all but 6 are showing flowers: 15 are clearly female, 4 are clearly male, one is a hermie. Now I'm wondering, why is the female to male ratio so high, so good, so wonderful? Is it genetics? Is it something about the soil or nutes or location? Is it just dumb luck? Wouldn't it be wonderful to find a way to get this sort of ratio every time (w/ colchicine or something)? I mean, even if the 6 unknowns are all males, it's still going to be 15:10 (60%) and if half of the unknowns are females, then it's 18:7 (not counting the hermie).

I'll whack the males soon of course, ut I'll probably let the most robust males flower and then whack them and dust the females so the early female flowers will produce some seeds for future crops. No problem doing that, but I'm am slightly hesitant (only slightly) to whack the hermie too soon - I know it'll fertilize itself and nearby females if I don't, but it seems a shame, especially since it looks to be 80% female and 20% male. This is the kind of problem I like!

TRRU · 07-22-2002, 07:39 AM

if youre delicate especially at a certain part of the late seedling stage you will up with more females. very experienced growers can end up with around 80 to 90 percent! dont ask me how as im a rookie. its a good sign that you know what your doing as a grower. o and i read a while back that unnatural hermies (ones that are changed by the grower somehow, with weird chemicals) that were females and are turned into males are how they make feminized seeds, along with other stuff too, but maybe youd want to experiment with that a little bit.

3hounds · 07-22-2002, 01:02 PM

Male/female ratio can be affected by a few things like depth of pot seedling was started in, the light a seedling receives, the amounts of nitrogen present, temperature seedlings are kept in, etc. (some of this is fact, some is gleaned by growers over the years).
Your outstanding ratio says that somehow you did all the right things..... congratulations.
Sometimes things really do work out!

07-22-2002, 02:57 PM

i personally think the higher female ratio has to do with germination. when i first started this hobby a few years ago, i really didn't pay much attention to germination - just soak the seeds in tap water for a day, then cover them with whatever dirt was around, then stick 'em in the sun. i was lucky if i got 50% germination, and really lucky if i got half of those seedlings females.

well, since i started being more serious about germination, like using good potting soil and perlite, watering with bottled water, not fertilizing too soon, watching the lighting, etc., things have gotten MUCH better. i usually get at least 75% germination rate (mostly around 90+%), then at least 75% females! the last grow was an astounding 86% female!

me thinks it's all in the germination, amigo.

anyway, i think i'd get rid of the hermie, and fast. you don't want any of those genetics to propogate into your grows...

and good luck! post a pic or two if you can...

Alabama · 07-22-2002, 04:18 PM

Yo JoséHempSeed - muchas gracias. Yeah, you and 3hounds might have an idea there - if it's all (or even partly) in the germination (blows what I learned about X and Y chromosomes - oh, that's animals isn't it?) then I must have been lucky - used pure (reverse osmosis) water to germinate and pure little peat cups to get the seedlings going. They were germinated in a dark warm cabinet between wet (purified water) paper towels on paper plates in closed zip-loc bags. When the new root (bless its little fuzzy white self) was about a 1/4 inch long (and before the cotyledons appeared) the germinated seeds were transferred to the peat cups (rootlet down, 1/2 inch deep in the soaked peat) and placed on my deck in the full April sun. If anyone can figure what part of that helped 'em beat the 50:50 trend, well more power to you muchachos y muchachas. This gringo may be too pendejo to figger it out...

07-22-2002, 05:42 PM

bama, your method is very close, some might say even ereily close, to mine! i wonder if nature has some way to know when the little seedlings will have a better chance at success, then crank up the girlie juice (or whatever it is

), and produce more females to take advantage of the situation (doesn't that sound like a girlie thing???) and have more babies to propogate more...

3hounds · 07-23-2002, 02:40 AM

Here is a direct quote from the Dutch Passion website:

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:
1 a higher nitrogen concentration will give more females.
2 a higher potassium concentration will give more males.
3 a higher humidity will give more females.
4 a lower temperature will give more females.
5 more blue light will give more females.
6 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.

Please check out the page as a whole for more depth.

Alabama · 07-23-2002, 06:16 AM

Thanks for the link 3Hounds. I just wish they would give more quantitative info (how much blue light, how much humidity etc) - and what'sup with the paragraph on the Dutch Passion site after the list of gender-influencing conditions you copied to your post?It sounds like their "feminizing" process actually produces hermies from fems for the production of all female seeds - I don't exactly get the point of that other than to produce seeds from female clones - their experiment doesn't appear to unequivocably address the present concern of how to increase the female to male ratio in a gender-mixed bag of seeds.

3hounds · 07-23-2002, 12:57 PM

I think the jury is still out on how much, etc.
It is a learning process for all of us.

The females they use to produce feminized seeds are not hermies (as the amateurs would have you believe). They are genetically female plants who have beem chemically induced (with gibberellic acid) to produce male flowers, with which they self pollinate. The resulting seeds are indeed feminized- I've used them and they work.
The Dutch Passion feminized seeds are the only ones I would use- I would not buy from anyone if I had the slightest doubt that they knew what they were doing. That is where you get hermies

bongripz · 07-23-2002, 01:50 PM

The light definatley has something to do with it.... I use cool blue floros for the seedlings inside, and give am 12.5 h on, 11.5 off. this gives me like a 3:1 f:m ratio almost every season!

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