So, I typically will only buy/grow feminized seeds as my growing space has been quite limited. I have now expanded and acquired some seeds from Greenpoint. These are 10x regular seeds (the deputy—Bruce banner #3) and I am going to germ 7 of them and place in the same tent. I’m hoping to be able to tell sex by preflowers within 3 wks so I can remove the males.
Questions:
Will I be okay in doing this? Will I need to “sanitize” the space that still has the femmes?
Can males produce pollen during veg?
Can females be pollinated during veg?
Thanks!
3 weeks from seed probably won't be long enough time in veg to preflower them. There are a couple ways to ID/separate the sexes both of which have their own qualms. Sexing is not messy at all if you detect the male plants early. If you wait too long, that is until the boy flowers pop off, then you are fucked. Early detection is key. I have personally never been able to tell the sex just by preflowering. I can say that generally the boys show sex first followed by the girls and that it takes 5-6 weeks at minimum from seeds for the plants to be sexually mature enough to show.
Taking clones and then vetting each of those works but it's not really that much faster than sexing out plants from seed. The advantage here is that your plants never transition to flowering and instead continue on in veg mode which makes for larger plants in the same time frame. The problem is first you have to veg them until you can take clones say week 5 or 6 from seed. Then you gotta wait a couple weeks to root the clones and then another week or 2 under 12/12 for said clones to show their sex. Then let's say you've got half of the viable clones to be girls & those will yield pretty much squat. Never tried transitioning clones without roots to bloom phase & maybe that is possible but you've still gotta wait til they are mature enough to show sex.
Nowadays I start all my plants from reg seeds and then vet them for sex en masse. I think it is easier to flip them in small containers at week 4-5 and separate them as they begin to show. I put them in solo cups in a tray so I can water them from the bottom alongside my flowering plants in my dedicated bloom room. Again early detection is key or the whole room would be seeded. They take awhile (10-15 days) to show sometimes as some plants are not quite sexually mature by then. The cons are that once you have ID-ed them and killed off the males you've got tiny plants that will yield squat. Once they show pistils i transplant to a 3g pot and put them back in veg for another 3-4 weeks. They take longer to transition back to veg again after sexing than the initial transition to flower from veg mode but at least you saved space and time not growing out males.
Monster cropped plants get nice tight bushy branch structures that result in short fat stubby colas. Root bind can also slow transition back to vegging but since they have been started in flowering already it speeds up ripening just a bit. They sort of pick up in flower where they left off. Allowing a few more weeks in veg affords the opportunity to take clones too. Plan to select a few mothers and reveg them after harvest to take clones & eventually eliminate the sex-vetting process altogether.
