More information about Feminized seeds

Feminized or feminised means that the seeds you purchase are only female. This is ideal because you can’t actually work with male cannabis plants; they don’t produce any flowers with THC. Feminized seeds are more expensive than regular seeds, which normally have half male and half female seeds. The formation of female plants can also be affected in other ways. The following information is from Dutch Passion.

Advantages
Feminized seeds have several advantages over regular seeds:
1. First of all, almost all are female progeny plants. This is a great advantage for growing them under artificial light, in the greenhouse and in the ground.
2. The quality (taste, aroma, power) of marihuana from feminized seeds is on average better than the quality of marihuana from the average seed-plant.
3. The quality of marihuana from feminized seeds is also better than marihuana produced by cloning. Clones are adult plants, which exhibit stunting and therefore lack the growing power of young seed-plants. This lack of growing power can also be seen in the quality (THC-content and taste) of the harvest. The older the clones get, the weaker they become.

The formation of female cannabis plants
In an experiment in 1999, Dutch Passion planted 15 varieties of feminized seeds, (30 seeds per variety) to:
-  determine the percentages of female, male and hermaphrodite plants.
-  compare the homogeneity between the plants of each species.

The results were very promising. Nine out of the 15 varieties tested had 100% female progeny, while the percentages of female progenies of the other 6 varieties fluctuated between 80 and 90 per cent. The other plants were hermaphrodites, where the male flowers were at the end of their flowering time, so that seed formation could hardly take place. About seventy per cent of the plants grown from “feminized” seeds were more homogeneous than the plants of the same variety grown from ‘regular’ seeds. Approximately twenty per cent were slightly more homogeneous, while about ten per cent showed no difference.

Our own research and literature shows that the formation from a seed of a male or female cannabis plant depends on various environmental factors (nitrogen, potassium, humidity, temperature, the colour of the light used, hours of light per day, stress), with the exception of the predisposition in gender chromosomes.

An increase of the nitrogen value results in more female cannabis plants. An increase of the potassium value results in more male plants and vice versa. An increase in humidity results in an increase in the number of female plants from seeds, and a decrease in male plants. A lower temperature results in a larger number of female cannabis plants, and higher temperature results in more male plants. More blue light gives more female plants from seeds; more red light gives more male plants. Fewer hours of light per day gives more female individuals, more hours of light per day gives more male plants.

Production
For the production of our feminized cannabis seeds we began with selected female clones (cuttings) of our cannabis-varieties. Under normal grow-conditions, these female cuttings do not produce any male inflorescence. With the method developed we are able to have these female clones produce exuberant male inflorescence. We used the pollen produced for the production of our “feminized cannabis seeds”.

Dutch Passion does not hold itself responsible for the percentage of female plants obtained from our “feminized seeds”, because this percentage depends on various factors, particularly the type of growing techniques used by the consumer.