Why grow with feminized cannabis seeds? The answer is pretty simple actually it is because only the female plant produced the rich bud that gives you the effects that you are looking for. That is why so many growers are in the market for feminized seeds, that will only produce female plants. Thanks to science modern breeders are able to ensure the seeds are feminized with a success rate of almost 100%.
Male vs. Female Plants
Cannabis plants that you allow to be pollinated naturally will produce seeds that are both male and female and you will get them in about a 50/50 split. If you are trying to grow your own plants from traditional seeds then half of them will be useless to you. Growing this way is expensive and inefficient, not to mention that male plants can ruin your grow. For years growers planted double the amount they needed in the hopes of half of the plants being female.
Efficiency is Everything
Today growers depend on feminized seeds so they can eliminate the guesswork and grow the right amount of plants that they need rather than twice as much and hoping for the best. For those that grow medical cannabis then efficiency is everything, even those growing strictly for personal use want to make the most out of their grow. The male plants do far more than just take up space they take your time and resources as well.
If you have been using traditional seeds then you need to devote time and attention to all of your plants until you know which sex they are. Some cannabis strains you can find out early before the flowering begins but that isn’t the case most of the time. You only really find out the sex of your plants when the amount of light they receive changes. Now you have to examine each plant and determine their sex and remove the males before the females are pollinated. For a big grow operation this is pretty labor intensive.
How Seeds are Feminized
There are a couple of methods that work the old fashioned way was to interrupt the light cycle of a healthy female plant but today growers use a different method. Spraying female plants with a solution of colloidal silver allows growers to control the sex of the plant without doing any genetic modifications. The silver works but interrupting the production of ethylene a hormone that is part of the flowering process. The results are seeds that are almost always female.