After you switch your lights to 12/12, how many weeks befor you start seeing the sex of your plants?
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@pressure_42o. Usually takes 2-3 weeks to form budlets after switching to 12-12.
Should see pistils in about 7-10 days. 
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Thanks! The worst part is the wait… lol
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More than welcome 
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7-10 days could be longer if sativa… I am at 30 days on a Bubba Kush and still not 100% sure where a Willy’s Skunk is obvious at 7 days… same timer same stealth box same spectrum bulbs (2700K)…
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Well everyone else here has grown for like a thousand years, probably taught Moses how to grow the chronic and so their numbers are likely dead-on. Only thing I would add with my meager experience is this. I too was wrestling with your exact problem/worry and when I asked I got so many conflicting opinions passed off as fact that I was worse off weeding out males (no pun untended) than I was before and of course, everything went to hell. So I used that as a teaching experience and looked a the problem as an engineer: I realized it really doesn’t matter WHEN they express sex; the real actual question you are trying to answer is: is plant X male or female? And the usual reason you do so is so that you can get males out before they can pollinate the females and screw everything up.
Further muddying the waters is the fact that I tend to live on the edge so to speak using unstable crosses for experiments in terror so there is a further randomizing factor at work here.
Well I rolled all that up and had a smoke and realized one other thing from my experiments: in every case I tried (few strains, some mine, some commercial) is that regardless of when it happened, the males always show up first by a good week to maybe 10 days…and what that meant to me is the females were safe for at LEAST that week or so, so the fact that something shows up first was my first clue to the males and since I didn’t stress the first time something showed sex (since there was zero chance a female would get hit yet because there were no females yet) I was able to observe it a few days with a calmer mind before deciding and this was enough to make it work for me. I don’t do so much with males anymore but even if so, its a stressor I no longer have because I use their progression instead of just measuring days. This gives me the time to observe and when you can take that time, the male/female differences become not only obvious but almost second-nature…
EDIT: Sorry folks, my LBD phase was slipping south and I ended that in the middle of the key thought.
What I was trying to say was,
- As a rule, males will show sex earlier than females of the same strain, in many cases up to 10 days before.
- Once female parts show, they still have a good ways to go before they are ready to take pollen.
- Not knowing everyone elses plans for growing, mine were basically I used femmed seeds when I had them, used regs and pulls males when I didn’t. However in every case I only flowered same strains together so that the flowering phenoes should be similar.
4… Add all that up and you watch. if you expect them to be all or mostly fem and one shows “something”; you continue to watch and if nothing ELSE shows sex, odds are really high the first is a male, not because of what it actually is but when it happened in relation to the rest of the flowers. - If everything is turning at once, odds are everything is the same sex and if you are sure about one female, you can be sure of the lot of them. If any were male, the statement “they are all turning at once” would fail. True, in theory this could also work out if they were ALL male but I am not wishing that misfortune on anyone.
I know this still runs counter to what many teach so many I should just chill for now…
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I had a male spew pollen just walk across the room with it and had only been forced for 10 days…so unless looking for a male get it out as soon as possible…I check daily when forcing…once I get room by having my outdoors outdoors and not in my tent I will start sexing by cloning first…
I got REALLY lucky a few years ago; I do alot of experiments so use alot of plant starts, more than I could afford buying them all (and getting clones in the desert is a joke) so like I said I got lucky, my grow mentor was growing three of his favorits, GG#4, Tahoe Cure and Citrus Sap (these names should seem familiar from my writings and pics). All femmed in a greenhouse in NorCal…and something happened to trigger hermies in all of them but only a small portion per plant. What came out of that happy accident were thousands of femmed seeds (not one male in years of experiments wiht them) that are mostly those strains but they exhibit phenos of the other two. Not one hermie yet and they grow strangely vigorously, almost beastly. So he shared a few hundred with me and I have been happily using them ever since. They produce a WILD variety of phenos, every now and then one dud (almost zero trichomes) but the rest are beasts just covered with bud and trichs and they ALL either taste like GG#4 or Citrus Sap (fruity). All that is to say I haven’t sexed plants in a long while and the last time I had to male show up it was in an expensive batch femmed GSC from Europe from a big name seed bank. All went male…fuckers.
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