Grow Q&A: Feminized or Regular Seeds for Mother Plants?

Dear Dan, I need your expert input on mother plants from which to get clones. Is it better to use feminized seeds or to use regular seeds and then sex them out? Can you make a good mother plant from feminized seeds and then use clones from that to grow with? – Joe

Dear Joe,
I don’t recommend growing out mother plants from feminized seeds. The benefits of feminized seeds are being able to plant seeds and knowing that your plants will be females so you can have an easy crop grown out from seeds. If you’re growing from seeds in order to pick out a mother plant from which you will take numerous clones and grow many crops with, my belief is that you’re much more likely to find a “keeper” phenotype when you’ve taken advantage of the hybrid vigor you get from F1 hybrids, thus regular seeds.

Be sure to take clones from the seedlings in order to determine which ones are females or males. Flowering your mother plants and then switching them back to the vegetative stage will stress them out, and you don’t want stressed out mother plants. Instead, use the corresponding clones to decide which are your “keeper” females and then discard all males and unwanted females (or worse, hermaphrodites). This way, you’ll have healthy clones from non-stressed properly chosen mother plants for years’ worth of crops.

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