What Do Feminized Seeds Mean?

Nowadays, when you go online to order from your favorite cannabis seed bank, you will notice how it most likely has more feminized seeds than any other variant. After all, feminized seeds are much more efficient in today’s growing and expanding cannabis industry. But what exactly do feminized seeds mean?

Cannabis sexes

The same as most if not all living creatures on this planet, marijuana plants come in other male or female sexes. There is a 50-50 chance that you will end up with either male or female by planting and growing a regular cannabis seed. Of course, both of those sexes have their own respective roles to play.

Male marijuana plants are the ones that start the entire seed production. They are the ones that grow up to develop pollen sacs that will eventually burst open to release pollen. The pollen released will reach nearby female marijuana plants to pollinate them. When that happens, females will be able to produce marijuana seeds.

Meanwhile, female cannabis plants do not normally have pollen sacs. What they develop are flowers or buds that contain all of the THC and chemical compounds that induce that feeling of getting high that marijuana is known for. Buds get harvested precisely for their psychedelic effects and therapeutic benefits. In other words, if you are focused on bud production, you need to have female plants.

That said, male cannabis plants are generally useless for those who want to focus all of their efforts on producing and selling buds. They may even slow down your entire production because pollinated females will put all of their efforts into producing seeds instead of producing healthy and full buds. As such, you will end up with flowers that are more than likely poor in terms of quality. Simply put, you need to get rid of male plants as soon as you detect them.

But it can be too much of a hassle waiting for your plants to grow before you can determine whether they are male or female. It then takes a lot of effort on your part to pluck out the males before they spread their pollen. This is where feminized seeds come in.

What then are feminized seeds?

The ugly truth is that there is no efficient way for you to tell whether your regular cannabis seeds will end up becoming male or female. You really have to wait for them to grow for you to determine their sex. In that case, you should use feminized seeds to get rid of all the hassle of having to wait for your seeds to grow.

Feminized seeds are cannabis seeds that only end up as female marijuana plants. What that means for you is that using feminized seeds will guarantee that all of your plants will end up as bud-producing female marijuana. Simply put, you will have a growing space that is 100% efficient in terms of bud production. No need to pluck out males or having to suffer the risk of wasting all of your time and effort into growing seeds that will eventually turn out to be males.

How are feminized seeds produced?

There are two ways of producing feminized seeds:

Colloidal silver method

The colloidal silver method is the more popular and more expensive way of producing feminized cannabis seeds. It also is the more unnatural way of doing so because you will be introducing a chemical substance just to produce feminized seeds.

To start, you will need a colloidal silver solution. You can get this in a lot of local or online stores or even pharmacies because of how it is also used for other health concerns. There are even ways for you to make your own colloidal silver solution.

Once you have secured your colloidal silver solution, choose a mature female cannabis plant carefully. Spray the colloidal silver solution onto that chosen plant for 10 to 14 days. If you regularly do so, you will be forcing the female plant to produce its own pollen sacs. And after the pollen sacs reach maturity to the point that they look like they are about to burst open, collect them.

Dry the pollen sacs out before using them. After doing so, you can collect pollen out of those sacks and introduce them to another female plant to pollinate them. Seeds produced this way will end up as feminized cannabis seeds because of how they got their traits from two female plants.

The advantage of using the colloidal silver method is that it makes sure that all of the feminized cannabis seeds will grow up without male traits. That is because the plants you used as parents are both females and have genetics that you did not tamper with other than the fact that you forced one of those females to develop pollen sacs through artificial means.

Speaking of artificial, the mother plant you sprayed the colloidal silver solution on should be discarded as soon as you collect the sacs. You should never consume its buds as doing so will expose you to several health hazards.

Rodelization method

The Rodelization method is the more natural and affordable way of producing feminized seeds because you do not have to spend money using chemical solutions to get your desired results unlike when you are using the colloidal silver method.

What you have to do here is to observe your female cannabis plants and wait for something called hermaphroditism to happen. Hermaphrodites occur when female cannabis plants force themselves to develop male traits as their last-ditch effort to pollinate themselves. As you might have guessed, hermaphrodites will change their genetics to develop male characteristics such as pollen sacs.

Once the pollen sacs develop, go and collect them from the hermaphrodites. Similar to the colloidal silver method, you can introduce those pollen sacs to other female plants to produce feminized seeds.

While this method might not be as expensive and as artificial as the colloidal silver method, it is not as effective. First of all, you are banking your hopes on the possibility that hermaphrodites emerge out of your batch of female plants. This is no certainty that hermaphrodites will emerge even if you have kept your female cannabis plants in the flowering stage long enough.

Second, the pollen found in the pollen sacs you collected from hermaphrodites is not nearly as potent and abundant as the ones you will find in male marijuana plants. And third, hermaphrodites are genetically females with male attributes. That means that there is also a possibility that they will pass on those male attributes to the feminized seeds. You might end up with feminized seeds but you will be running the risk of having female marijuana plants that will end up as hermaphrodites.