Kriegs,
I'm curious as to how long you vegged your plants and under what light cycle?
I never see any indication of sex until after a week or two after switching to 12/12.
This time around I vegged for 42 days before switching to 12/12. With in 10 days of doing that I had them all sexed.
It's been 38 days since the seeds went into the soil. They went directly under the 400 after a couple days of emergence, and they've been on 18/6 since. The pre-flowers are extremely tiny; much more so than the real ones. I'll try to put a pinhead or something in the photos to give perspective although when you're shooting that close, hand stability is at a premium.
I'm also a little confused as to why they call those first little pods with the white hair (pistil) sticking out of them that show up a pre flower. What's "pre" about it? As far as I can tell it's a fully formed single female flower pod. The plant just hasn't had time to form clusters of them yet.
And while I know the difference between an "opposing" and an "alternating" node I don't fully understand their relationship to the flowering cycle.
About half my plants are still forming opposing nodes but they're piling on pistils and forming buds just as strongly as the plants that have switched to forming alternating nodes.
I can't say I tracked my pre-flowers last year to see if they formed real flowers, but I'm about 99% sure they don't. The male pre-flower is particularly different from the real male flower that dispenses pollen. Pre-flowers are basically sterile, and I think they're "committed" to being that single little pod.
A lot of growers are convinced that alternating nodes are a required element b4 going 12/12 - a sign of maturity that must be there before the plant is really ready to flower. A lot of these folks feel the same way about pre-flowers, BTW (ie. don't go 12/12 until you see them..). I'm not totally convinced these are "must-have" conditions, but I do take them as extra signs that the plant has reached a new level of maturity, and that my root growth is at a point where it can support optimal flowering. But, I'm really just guessing on that.
I think chrisMK raised a good point about maybe keeping one of those male bubs so you could get some future seed stock of that strain. I've done this before and it's pretty easy to do where you just get some seeds on some of the lower branches but yet keep most of the plant seedless. Let me know if you want me to expand on how to go about doing this.
In fact I'm probably going to selectively pollinate some of the lower branches on my current crop of girls with pollen I collected over a year a go just to get some more fresh seed stock.
That's a really good idea -- and
thanks to chrisMK for bringing it up. I really like the strain and would be tickled to have a couple hundred seeds of it hangin around. The biggest male is just a fantastic specimen, too -- aggressive, branchy, bulletproof, and was the first to show sex. I think I know how to do this, but you're welcome to tell me your method. Also - I have a very specific question about this: How far away do I need to get that male from my girls? Can it be in the same house? I fear the HVAC system could pick up the pollen and spread it everywhere..
Another good thing (from a learning perspective) you can do with un wanted males is to put them off in a separate area (and it doesn't have to be optimum conditions like you're keeping the females in) and then purposely try to kill them with what ever nutes you're using and watch and see just what signs they develope that indicate over ferting. I mean you're going to kill them any how so why not let them die in the name of science.
Jack
Definitely. I'll probably give one of them a true topping, just to convince myself about the value of topping by practicing on a non-essential plant. I've got a little while before they pop real balls. I'm also going to test-drive my soil layering technique with them. I probably won't do any nute tests on them for the simple reason that I can't give them the same lighting they have now. So, their internal demand is going to drop greatly and confound the experiment. Although thinking of it now, I could give them a full strength blast of my Foxfarm while they still have time under the 400 to see if they can take it. I burned up some sativas with that shit last year, so I know what that looks like.
One of my male bub's also "escaped its FIM" -- it seems I cut the terminal bud too high and the plant is really just resuming normal growth. The side branching looks the same as an unaltered plant.
As luck would have it though, the FIM that did "take" was on the female bub's, and she's just blowin' branches all over. Next grow, everyone gets fimmed, and earlier in the grow, too, so there will be a good time space between the FIM recovery and the upcan.
Well, that's what fem seeds and clones are for. I hit 50% last year and just figured I would at least hit 33% this time. Shit. Add that up with me burning up some leaves with my ozonator, and my HPS flickering for a couple hours when I first fired it, and it was a fuck of a day (the light settled down and is fine now; found a new place for the ozonator, too).