Growing for Males

oh, you could expose to long darkness, then revege it once sex is revealed, but this is very time consuming and have to deal with revege symptoms - excess, wasteful branching that just makes a mess of a canopy full of shitty tiny buds. I regretted doing this, but I also didn't allot enough time to do it properly and ended up throwing out a couple plants from reg seed. This something you could do leading into your intended grow cycle.. Or, get known gendered plants (put into flower, revege long before need) and take clones when the time comes. A lot of time, space, effort involved for that, too.

A local lab can take tiisue cultures and test for gender. Prices will vary. Think it's about 10usd per plant? It's been years since i saw an example. There's a lab in detroit that does it. I'm sure there are places near you too. probably have to mail a bit of leaf and then however long for their turnaround. Not an endorsement, just a url of an example - https://medicinalgenomics.com/gender-detection/ You can buy a used "Thermal Cycler" for about 300-500 USD? Find a local medical supply company or check out ebay. The supplies you need in addition to that are a bit on expensive side too, despite being a bunch of plastic throwaway junk, lol. The pdf from medicinalgenomics has a list of all the stuff you'd need. 8-16 well mini PCR.. there are 96-well options. If you split costs with someone, it becomes a more viable option or can even start to offer to sell the service yourself to other growers to recover costs. Ha, turns out that is the site i downloaded the instructions from a few years ago. I had to email them to get a pdf of it... they may or may not still offer that, if not i'd be happy to post a download link. Took a screenshot of the program instructions for gender testing: https://bucket.growdiaries.com/static/post/photo/220714/11022687_2d6119f40c17d43e49da855a25fa0766_big.jpg There's no improving male/female outcomes. It's already in the seed when it starts. Even herms are still biologically male or female... not sure why someoen would herm a male plant, but assume it's possible? 50/50 chance is all you get unelss they are feminized seed. Making feminized seeds issuper easy. You don't need both STS and CS. One or the other is fine, but STS is 3 applications 5 days apart, whereas CS is applying everyday for 10-14 days and definitely makes the plant more sickly by comparison to STS. Conversion is more consistent with STS too. This is one of those things where if you apply too much, you fuck up the results. There is a goldielocks zone.. Sigma aldritch (renamed recently) has a recipe. It needs further dilution of 1:9 or 1:5.67 to dilute to 2-3 micromoles concentration. https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/technical-documents/protocol/cell-culture-and-cell-culture-analysis/plant-tissue-culture/silver-thiosulfate You'll need a microgram scale - .001g +/-.003, if you want to make any batch smaller than 500mL. The % error for the .01g +/-.03g scales is just too large for the weights. Even if you wasted half a liter, it's still WAY cheaper than the pre-mixed stuff.. Also, the shelf life on this stuff is very short once mixed up into STS, so those companies often send out bunk, expired solutions. silver nitrate - ~2 dollars / gram on ebay last i looked sodium thiosulfate - 8 dollars for 113g you need to bout about 1:4 ratio of these. 10grams of silver nitrate will need about 40grams of sodium thiosulfate. you can do the math based on teh url instructions above. it'll make a shit ton. 5 grams of silver nitrate would probably last a home grower 5-10 years unless you are doing a tone of breeding projects. I bought 10g a few years ago. I've done 1-2 breeding cycles per year since. It's not running out anytime soon. I doubt i'm 1/4th of the way through it. I only bought a better scale for this year's breeding. The 75% that remains will last 3x longer proportionally. no metal! lol... no metal. seriously. This shit will permenantly stain stuff (silver nitrate) and highly corrosive. Don't get cute with the instructions. The ratios and volumes of distilled water are all important. you can scale it but don't try to consolidate steps to get the diluted product on first step... It is a double replacemenet reaction and requires the specific instructions to have consistent outcomes. Unlike cooking, just follow the instructions exactly or exactly to scale and it's easy as pie.

Buying regular seeds rather then just female seeds. There should be 50% chance that half of them will be male.

Just have to grow out reg seed and hope for the best. its a coin toss. 50/50 chance. Anecdotally I have found anyone growing reg seed that I know in person always gets way more males then females but logically it is 50/50. Grow out ten plants. keep em small, then pick the ones you like. Separate the males as soon as they are showing sex and let the female or females grow a bit bigger and then pollinate them with the desired male or males. Give seed 4-6 weeks to ripen on the plant. I normally just let the plant go till its dead and then the seeds are extra viable. did this with an aut backcross and the seeds that feel into the soil sprouted up when I moved the dirt into my outdoor planters.

A number if manufacturers have recommendations such as STS every few days then CS in-between those days for selfing female plants. I can't say I have a schedule for spraying that works consistently. Some strains are much more finnicky (sterile pollen, empty nanners, gigantic male flowers with months and months of flower time, etc.). IMO regular seed derived females are much more resilient to the spraying but they produce more pollen and are more viable. Theoretically, you don't need 95% of the spraying that is recommended but having an S1 project fail can suck. As long as you can disrupt the hormone activity long enough to set her down a one way path to being a him. There were dudes on a podcast I listen to out with the crew that dropped Bickett OG and he was saying he only sprays twice with STS. I've tried this and haven't had much success. I typically just do STS every 3 days applied with a qtip. If you mean selfing by like F2ing and needing to pop males, idk. I seem to only pop females from reg seeds.