I understand that professional growers seldom use feminized seeds. For us home growers with not more than 10 plants, what would be the advantages or disadvantages of using regular seeds? Can someone please explain?
Also, since I am making clones I need to be sure it’s a female. But in the veg phase the sex is hard to tell…
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I’m currently dealing with regular seeds and wishing they were fem. Super hard to tell female from male and I’m in week 7. Personally I won’t be running regs again free or not.
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Unless you plan to breed, or grow one strain for a long time feminized are the way to go. Most of us don’t have the space/plant count to spend on potential male plants. For a personal grow I’d rather have a few different strains of known females growing rather than give that space to males that I would trash.
It’s been 15-20 years since I’ve run any regular plants but I think both the plants and their cuttings were a bit more vigorous than what I see with feminized varieties today. I still take clones from most of my plants just in case I find something special and want to run it back . . . but most of those are gifted.
Of course the cuttings I take today are from feminized plants being fed a veg nutrient formula rather than a mother plant version. I recall seeing healthier rooted cuts when the mother was fed a high calcium/low nitrogen nutrient mix with no silica added.
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The pro would be of course female. The con would be growing performance, for me anyway. The feminized seeds just have a slow and funky start to them. Im wondering if its chemical related.
And for checking the sex, the male’s will flower first. Omce you grow a male you will understand the growth differences.
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Thanks @Bentgenetics. I know a little bit about how they produce feminized seeds, so the chemical aspect is definitely to consider.
I grew some regular seeds some years ago but still found it hard to tell just from the growth or shape which is which. Until the preflowering started…
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Now also consider i grow for outdoors, so i dint use light’s. So that might be different to sex, . But if there’s a difference that would be something to learn about.
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Sun is different for sure. I think it has to do with the dawn and twilight hours where under lights it’s 12/12 high noon/pitch dark. I’ve looked at this a bit when I was thinking of adding a light controller with dawn to dusk features. But there is more to it than just a brightening or dimming of the lamp, the sun’s degree above the horizon affects both intensity and spectrum of the light and my budget doesn’t cover a TrolMaster/ThinkGrow system.
Where I grew up the average day in July is 14 hours, 7 minutes. But if you look at actual sunlight there is only an average of 9 hours, 3 minutes. At no point on the calendar is there more than 10 hours actual radiant sunlight.
My outdoor grows were back in the '70s and early '80s . . . I didn’t know to look for pre-flowers so I can’t say when they first showed, but they would be in flower by early/mid August.
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I do autos inside and it’s just for me so I don’t want to wait and find out if it’s a male and have to start over. That’s just me though. Granted there is always a chance no matter how small. But I’ve yet to have a male plant.
I did one outside and for me it grew funny…it looked like half a plant because one side really didn’t get any direct sunlight. Another thing about outside to consider is the temperature fluctuations can vary wickedly.
Ive come to prefer indoors for more stability and control , but know outdoors are bigger.
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