How-To: Make your own feminized seeds.

Ok, so the title basically says it all. With the exception of cloning, this is the next best way to continue your grow room and, get a high percentage of female plants. I will start out with the organic, and highest success rate for female seeds. Some growers might say some methods work better than others, but the general idea is the same, we are looking to get female seeds with the highest success rate. There are many different methods to making feminized seeds, though there is debate on which methods work best and yield rewardingly.


Rodelization Method

Many know this method as the "Rodelization" method, created and used by many growers, soma seeds uses this method, as well as most seed banks. It is written about, and endorsed by "High Times".

Basically what you need to do is grow a healthy female plant (not from feminized seeds!) take care of it all the way throughout the entire grow, under optimal conditions. You can start flowering about a month and a half after seeds sprout, by this time you should have roughly 7-10 nodes. Allow this female plant to flower longer than normal, approx 7-14 days after expected harvest. By this time, you should start to see "nanners" or "pollen sacks" on the buds, this is a safety mechanism that mother nature uses to ensure survival of the species. To most, a male banana is quite a beautiful thing. It has the potential of making all female seeds.

In the Rodelization method, the male banana is very valuable. After growing your female plants 10-14 days longer than usual, hang them up to dry, then carefully take them off the drying lines and inspect for bananas. Each and every banana should be removed, and placed in a small bag labeled very accurately. These sealed bags can be placed in the fridge for one or two months and still remain potent.

For the next phase, you need to have a separate crop thatâ??s already 2 1/2 weeks into flowering. Take your sealed bags of pollen out of the fridge, and proceed to impregnate your new crop of females with the nanners that you saved. To do this, you must first match the female plant and the pollen from the same strain in the previous crop. Shut all the fans in the grow room down. Then take a very fine paintbrush, dip it in the bag of pollen, and paint it on the female flower. Do this to each different strain you have growing together. Many have done it with up to 10 different kinds in the same room with great success.

You can also use this pollen to make new female crosses by cross-pollinating. The older females with the male bananas can be brought into the room with the younger, un-pollinated females after they are three weeks into flowering. Turn all of the circulation fans on high, and the little bits of pollen will proceed to make it around the room. Do this for several days. Six to seven weeks later, you will have ripe 100% feminized seeds; not nearly as many as a male plant would make, but enough to start over somewhere else with the same genetics.



Colloidal Silver Method

Colloidal silver is available from your local chemist (in low parts-per-million though), and is drank for good health (the silver helps kill bacteria etc). But its PPM is too low for what we intend to use it for - feminized seeds! So we need to make our own with a higher PPM ... no problems, we simply allow the electrical current to flow through the silver for a longer duration.

TO MAKE A COLLOIDAL SILVER GENERATOR ...
You will need: a 9V power adapter that outputs DC, two alligator clips, a soldering iron + solder. (If you don't have soldering iron you can simply wrap the wire around the alligator clip base in a coil and that will suffice, but you'll get better contact if you solder it).

- Get a power adapter that has an output of 9V DC 600mA or thereabouts. Output must be DC, and 9V/600mA seems optimal from what I've read and been told *You can use a cable modem power supply for this*

- Cut the end off and discard
- Split the main wire into its two smaller sub-wires (no need to pull them apart all the way though). Don't worry, we don't need to know which is positive/negative.
- Use wire-cutters to remove the plastic shielding/insulation to expose the actual metal wires, about 1 inch is enough
- Solder the wires onto alligator clips ($0.50ea from your local electronics store)

If you don't have alligator clips, a good alternative - drill a hole into each coin and coil the wire around that instead.

TO MAKE COLLOIDAL SILVER ...
- Get some distilled water. Do not use any other type of water due to impurities. At your supermarket you may find distilled water next to spring water, but it may also be in the ironing products isle as it is commonly used for steam irons.
- Attach each alligator clip to a chunk of PURE 999 or 9999 SILVER
- Make sure each coin is half-dunked in the water, but that the alligator clips themselves aren't touching the water, then turn on your generator and leave it for about 7 hours.

Similar to this picture:

http://i36.tinypic.com/294i690.gif
The end result: the electrolysis causes microscopic silver particles to be suspended in the water (= colloidal silver aka CS). The rig basically looks like this when in use (the only thing in contact with the water is the silver, not the alligator clips or anything else):


It's also recommended you use an airpump with a clean (not used for anything else) airstone to help keep the water moving.

Also you don't want to leave the CS generator running TOO long or the silver particles in the water start getting too large - ~8 hours should be plenty.

USING COLLOIDAL SILVER TO MAKE FEMINISED SEEDS ...
Start spraying your target plant with CS just before you send it into 12/12 flowering, and keep spraying every few days. I won't go into details, but the CS causes the female to produce male flowers/pollen. Collect that pollen, and use it to pollenate another female (you can pollenate the same female that you CS'd (aka "self'ing") and indeed you may have to if you have a clone-only strain, although that may lead to more hermaphroditic traits, but I wont go into details on that). Anyway, because you've pollenated a plant with pollen from a female, the pollen can only create female seeds.

There's obviously a lot more to it than that but hopefully this brief explanation will help people understand the basic jist of it.

ps. I don't recommend drinking home-made CS unless you've done your homework because the PPM may be too high, which is great for making feminized seeds (we need a higher PPM for that) but may have risks with human consumption - too much silver can cause argyria, a condition of blue or gray discoloration of the skin, so always buy it from your chemist if you intend to use it medicinally. Also if you do drink it medicinally it's recommended you also take additional probiotics (like Yakult), because the silver also kills a lot of the good bacteria inside you. So do your homework first!

Good luck on your feminizing! There are more methods, but I happen to favor these over the others, at least you know your plant won't die from stress and be a complete failure (i.e. light stress, heat, nutes, etc.)

Medical Disclaimer for silver treatments:
Use care. There's no proof that smoking silver is fine for medical cannabis users. (the target audience for this website)

For those inexperienced growers that thinks this sounds easy...if you don't know what you are doing...if you haven't taken your meds to harvest a few times to get familiar with the process...you can and likely will screw-up your genetics beyond usefulness. Or worse, make yourself or a loved one quite sick. Let's not injure or kill our members, lol.

But if you are experienced, or can afford the set-backs you will encounter, or if you can afford to keep purchasing replacement seeds, or if your on union insurance...then by all means...go for it. :thumbsup:

Given silver has a melting point of 1760F and a boiling/vapor point of 4000F, I seriously doubt one would be smoking it any time soon.

Of course you only want to make feminized pollen after you have found out that the girl (you want to use) will not hermi on you unless YOU make her do so. So in other words, follow Rusty's directions.. But if you must make female pollen using CS then...

The trick IMO to using Colloidal silver is. You don't smoke the plant or any parts of the plant that has been sprayed with the CS solution.. You just use the pollen that is made to pollinate a non-stressed girl or non-stressed parts of the girl.. After you collect the pollen I would recommend culling or removing the parts of the girl that was sprayed.. That just how I do it.

Do not smoke any plant material that is sprayed with CS, Just collect the pollen and move on..


That's one of the good things about spraying CS solution.. You can target only one branch. Once you collect the pollen from that branch, you just cut it off and use the pollen on the other parts of the non-stressed girl. :thumbsup:

I agree Dogznova, to be safe, just pollinate one bud on the plant, and you can use the rest for medical use :p

That way the silver particles don't get in you.

Im gonna give this a try..

Use care if inexperienced. If you can afford to replace your mistakes with new seeds, or don't mind pollinating every pistil the pollen can find, have at it.

This isn't a beginner technique. Know that you are risking yield and screwing-up the genetics, or pollinating successive grows for months, or...well...you get the picture, I hope.

Know what you are risking before diving in head first. I'd search onsite for the other femming threads. Some femming threads are more complete than others, but understand the entire process before you begin. :thumbsup:

Just a question, by using the CS will give you a less chance of the hermy gene in the seed then using a hermy to make femmed seeds?


:rasta:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LetsSeeYa

Just a question, by using the CS will give you a less chance of the hermy gene in the seed then using a hermy to make femmed seeds?


:rasta:

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That is a good question, anyone with the experience care to share their experiences with CS?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LetsSeeYa

Just a question, by using the CS will give you a less chance of the hermy gene in the seed then using a hermy to make femmed seeds?
:rasta:

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No. I'm fairly certain that stress tolerance is determined by the genes, not the treatments, unless the treatments are hormones or steroids. Hormones and steroids are likely to alter the genes, but the genetic change is not at all limited to the hermaphrodism you are refering to. They can also mess with growth habits, aroma, leaf structure and expression, internode spacing, the time it takes to finish, trichome spacing and structure, THC:CBN ratios...

Nice try though...:thumbsup:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rusty Trichome

No. I'm fairly certain that stress tolerance is determined by the genes, not the treatments, unless the treatments are hormones or steroids. Hormones and steroids are likely to alter the genes, but the genetic change is not at all limited to the hermaphrodism you are refering to. They can also mess with growth habits, aroma, leaf structure and expression, internode spacing, the time it takes to finish, trichome spacing and structure, THC:CBN ratios...

Nice try though...:thumbsup:

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Well i am no chemist so i would never touch the stuff, just wondering why someone would go through all that when you can keep hermy pollen for what, 6 months in the fridge? And hermy ratio is the same. I guess if your method is something you enjoy, then i guess i understand.

Thanks Rusty:rasta:

silver it self is a heavy metal. so due to the history of heavy metals (lead, tin, barium, molybdenum, on and on and on)
naturely one would want to avoid such a material.

Silver, niobium, titanium, and some other heavy metals have almost no interaction in the human body. It mostly passes through via the digestive track.

the condition you speak of is caused when you over load your system's way of getting rid of heavy metals.
eccesive silver is stored in you fat cells, giving you a grey complection.
you can take CS by the directions on the bottle and not contract
so if you do smoke your bud that has been dowsed in silver
and drink CS by the gallon everyday,you will most likly turn grey.
you'd turn grey from that amount of CS anyway
Do some research

Rusty,...

This is above my paygrade.

A friend just noticed a few seeds in his outdoor crop. Went on the male search and found three open male flowers, in a single cluster, dried up in a bottom branch in a tied down regrow. This regrow was planted in Feb and had flowered in May. The May harvest had no male parts...and was very tasty.

My question is are the seeds female?

This is the first time I have seen an already harvested regrow throw male parts this far into the second harvest. As a rule, if they are male or hermi, we catch them on or before the first harvest.

The plant had been pulled down low, and he under waters, but I wouldn't call this plant heavily stressed. The male flowers were in the shade though.

He is kinda bummed, I would like to tell him he at least got some good female seeds out of the deal...did he?

Much Mahalo

Those aren't male nanners, they're female nanners. A 'she' has no male chromosomes to make male seeds.

If the strain is stout and normally nanner-free, Something happened recently to stress her. The seeds from these female nanners will be 100% female, but make sure they (the seeds) are mature before harvest.
If the strain is normally nanner free, try and save some pollen for future fems. Any lady would love her pollen. Pollen will keep in the fridge for months, barring any external moisture. Keep in an airtight, watertight container. Habitual underwatering is stressful, so this may be the cause. Would have to fill-out a troubleshooting form to try and pinpoint the cause though.

But if the strain is a known hermie, the hermie trait will be carried-on to successive generations, so don't save the pollen. :thumbsup:

Seeded calyxes' get a yellowish 'racing stripe' from base to tip. Hard to miss once you recognize 'em.

Now that he knows there's nanners, keep looking. The more seeds she makes, the less he'll end-up with in smokable yield. He might want to look in the buds for the yellowish nanners, too. Nanners aren't limited to visible nodes. Don't destroy the buds looking, though. This would be counter-productive.

nice thread THcontent, Question when I find a bannana they are very small. I have yet to find anything that looks like pollen. How many do I need in a baggie? Why don't I see any pollen? Thanks

man sure sounds like alot of work to go thru and still take the chance of unstable genetics that could cause hemi's and screw up your entire grow sooner or later. why not just let your plants breed true. they way mother natured intended. it only take 1 male to pollenate an entire field of females.
my thoughts are if you germinate 100 seeds that you would have 99% rate of getting a females if you give them a stress free enviroment to grow in.
and breeding true and not dirupting the genetic make up of your plant will give you better yeilds and sooner later you will miss a hemi down deep in the plant and lose an entire grow to seed. some things are just better left alone

Have always heard that you can stress a plant into being female by using a higher light cycle during seedling and veg cycle ? A 16+ hour light cycle

Quote:

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Originally Posted by leftreartire

man sure sounds like alot of work to go thru and still take the chance of unstable genetics that could cause hemi's and screw up your entire grow sooner or later. why not just let your plants breed true. they way mother natured intended. it only take 1 male to pollenate an entire field of females.
my thoughts are if you germinate 100 seeds that you would have 99% rate of getting a females if you give them a stress free enviroment to grow in.
and breeding true and not dirupting the genetic make up of your plant will give you better yeilds and sooner later you will miss a hemi down deep in the plant and lose an entire grow to seed. some things are just better left alone

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Garbage in...garbage out. Start with a stable strain, and you'll end-up with stable femmed seeds, if done properly. Each and every strain and phenotype I have played with has the ability to be femmed, (which for most users is a huge time saving and space saving bonus) so speaking from personal experience, your info regarding turning your plants into hermies is not at all a valid concern. (your info is wrong)

Can a newcomer screw this process up? Sure. However they can screw-up 'normal' breeding and stress the ladies, too. But most hermies are from improper care, not an unstable strain. Doing stuff like making femmed seeds from a femmed lady that came from femmed seeds to begin with, and you'll eventually breed-in the ability to hermie with a minimum of stress. (undesirable)

Rusty.... Glad to see your still on your game...

IMO that needs to be the last post of this tread... :thumbsup:

"Doing stuff like making femmed seeds from a femmed lady that came from femmed seeds to begin with, and you'll eventually breed-in the ability to hermie with a minimum of stress. (undesirable) "

I think this is the most commonly-overlooked thing when it comes to most breeders and I am damned glad you pointed this out, Rusty - many rely too heavily upon 'guaranteed' (aka forced-feminized) female genetics and through unnatural ratios of male to female genetic production eventually breed in the adaptation to go hermaphrodite at the drop of a hat.

Granted, this doesn't happen THAT often, but we've all likely seen reports of some batches of certain feminized seed stock being almost 100% hermaphrodite from the get-go, even in some of the most prime growing conditions. My personal thoughts go as follows - No more than two generations straight of feminized-refined product, then you need to re-stabilize with fresh unmodified genetics before going through the refining process again, rinse and repeat until you have your desired result. Of course, in the game of genetics, you can't guarantee anything, but from personal experience in preserving landraces for the Dutch and refining those landraces to my personal tastes, this simple regimen seems to keep things quite stable.

Quality post, Rusty, even though you and I disagree and argue on other stuff!