@madgoose
I got a fuckin hermie..but I'm gonna pull any more Pollen sacs I see and keep it going.its my only grow so fuck it.plus it's still early in flowering,,might not see anymore.i hope.
don't stress over it. Are you growing for personal or are you looking to, erm? Recoup some of your expenses, so to speak? If it is for you no biggie, you just going to have to pull the seeds out before you put your bud in the grinder, if you looking to recoup, as long as the ganja is banging you may loose 20% off of your gross?
Don't get upset mate, just look at it as yo now have the reason to educate yourself on "flowering" and hermaphrodites/intersex. I have listed the chapters and pages below. It really is worth reading because it is relevant to you now so you will want to understand it.
My first successful grow went to seed but not because of hermaphrodites. I had been trying to sex some plants that I had grown from seed. I had taken two cuttings from each plant labelled them and put them in my flowering room with the 36 females I had that were at about week 4 of flowering and looking good.
At day 10 for the cuttings in the flowering room I gad to go to London and having been away at my grow which means I pretty much live like a recluse, I partied to hard and stayed 4 days instead of 2. As soon as I returned I went straight out to my flowering room, immediately I could see that the girls looked different. Over the next few days I noticed tiny green "balls" appearing, this was the beginning formation of the seeds. The final product was more than acceptable, yes i lost a little bit of the premium that I was lookin for, like 10% of my gross, it just meant people had to pluck out he seeds like weed of old.
I am guessing you had feminised seeds? I prefer to use regular seeds. The thing with feminised seeds are I feel that they are a bit of a false sense of security. Because of how they are made they cannot produce an outright male, only females and females that can turn hermaphrodite. The hermie part may be on one branch, or it could show traits of hermie all over the plant and could even turn hermie in the last week of flowering. I have heard of a single branch in the far corner of the room being overlooked and the result is the whole garden becoming seeded. You can still produce excellent weed even though it has gone to seed. I don't care how it looks, smells or tastes, I have bought weed before that looks like the yellow hay that the horse had shitted out (and didn't smell much better either) but it was an excellent smoke and I have grown weed that looks perfect, well formed, smells great and tastes good but it had no strength. Let me find the relevant pages in the book about seed genetics because they explain it a lot better than I can and that is where I learnt it from.
If you open the pdf and type in "hermaphrodite" in the search feature it will highlight the word at each place it appears in the book. There should be 17 results and if you use the up/down arrows to the left of the X (to close) it will scroll you to each appearance of the word.
Definitely read all of Chapter 4 "Flowering" page 178
See “Intersexuality” in Chapter Sixteen, Breeding.
Page 829 - "Plants exhibiting both staminate and pistillate flowers are most often referred to as “hermaphrodites” by drug cannabis cultivators but are more correctly referred to as intersex plants."
Page 859 - "
Intersex plants are often mistakenly called hermaphrodites. "
read through the section starting on page 858 as that explains (what I did not want to attempt to) about how the X and Y chromosomes
page 859 - "Ethylene is one of only a few known plant hormones, and plays many roles in plant development across a range of species. In cannabis, one of ethylene’s major roles is its involvement in the determination of sex. It regulates which flowers should be produced-stamen or pistil. We know this because applying high enough concentrations of ethylene to staminate individuals in the flowering cycle results in the formation of pistils. Conversely, applying ethylene-inhibiting agents to pistillate individuals as they enter flowering results in the formation of stamens in place of pistils. This practice can be of use to breeders in the creation of “feminized” seeds, or all-female (gynoecious) seedlots. "
THE NEXT SECTION I AM REFERRING TO, (a little deeper than I need to know about), is how "feminised" seeds are created,
"All female seeds are produced by obtaining pollen from one female individual, and subsequently fertilizing another female plant. When we previously discussed chromosomes, we said there were 20 chromsomes in each cell of the plant. The 10th pair of chromosomes, the smallest pair, are the sex chromosomes. Female cannabis plants have two copies of the X chromosome, therefore their genotype is XX. Male plants have only 1 copy of the X chromosome, and a Y chromosome instead of a second X chromosome. The genotype of male plants in terms of the sex chromosomes is XY."
I hope that was of some use to you. You can cut of the male sections off but it could lead to stressing the plant more, resulting with it then producing more male traits.
