Regular marijuana seeds produce male and female marijuana plants, with most growers finding that they get slightly more females than males.
Unless a grower is breeding marijuana strains, the grower has no need for male plants. They just take up space and if their presence is undetected, they may pollinate female flowers, creating seeded buds.
That’s why many marijuana growers use feminized seeds.
But feminized seeds are a new and unnatural technology. They don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. Sometimes they don’t germinate properly. Or they produce male cannabis plants or hermaphrodite plants (plants that have both male and female flowers).
Many feminized marijuana seeds are the result of pollinating a female plant with pollen created by a hermaphroditic marijuana plants. These seeds have a tendency to grow out hermaphroditic themselves.
To avoid these kinds of seeds, you have to ask the cannabis seed breeder if the breeder used hermaphroditic pollen to create the seeds. If they did, don’t use those seeds.
Some cannabis seed breeders produce feminized seeds by using chemicals and/or hormones to treat female plants so they produce pollen that doesn’t transmit hermaphroditic traits.
Others use colloidal silver.
None of these treatments is guaranteed to produce feminized marijuana seeds that will germinate easily, grow properly, reflect the strain genetics you bought, or be 100% female.
However, if you buy feminized cannabis seeds created by legitimate seed breeders and you germinate 10 seeds of a feminized strain, 7-9 out of 10 of those plants is likely to be female, which is a better ratio than using regular cannabis seeds.
One obvious thing to remember about feminized cannabis seeds is, if they all grow out female, you can’t reproduce those seeds. There’s no pollen.
If you want to keep that cannabis strain going for a long time, you have to clone that strain, or find pollen from a strain you want to combine with your target strain.
Legendary cannabis seed breeder Subcool of TGA Seeds refuses to produce feminized seeds or auto-flowering seeds. He points out that the main beneficiaries of feminized seeds are the seed companies, because growers can’t produce their own marijuana seeds from feminized strains.
Take a look at this great article on finding quality cannabis seeds, and happy growing!
