Seed Growers - How do you sex your plants?

Visual inspection? Phylos? Green Screen? Local testing lab?

How much do you pay per plant? How quickly do you get results and how accurate are they?

Many thanks in advance!

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If growing feminized seeds, it’s typically a pretty high success rate of females. I’ve grown hundreds of fems and honestly never had a single male to date, but I’m sure that percent of it happening goes up when the numbers rise equally.

I’ve got a buddy in AZ that is working on planting thousands of autoflowers by seed this spring/summer hopefully (all fems,) I can ask him if he worries about that rogue male popping up or what their methodology is as well. I’ve got another grower that just germinated 300 autoflower regs recently, I just sent him a text message and he’s replying:

“If you want to catch them early (the first set of balls,) it’s a bit of work.”

The farm this grower is on said the master grower had a clone cut that hermied out and pollinated a nice bit of crop (clones are not the cure-all they make them seem to be.)

Once that pollen sac develops enough to hang, you’ve got MAYBE a week before you got pollen problems, so vigilance is definitely of mind.

Is this for a breeding project? Growing?

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In my experience, we have sent sex testing to Phylos. At first, early in the life of Phylos testing we really felt that the results were coming in very accurate and timely(4-5 days), but it did cost $10 /test = $10 /plant. As we got to the point where we were sending 100-250 tests at a time, it seemed that the results started to become inconsistent, and they insisted that we were taking tests incorrectly. Upon re-training (which was not needed) on the process, we still saw inconsistencies, and as you can imagine, it became very expensive quickly when we had to start pulling plants out of rooms due to incorrect sexing results.

My suggestion would be to outfit a small plant sexing room / corner of a room / closet where you can take the seeds, after clones have been taken, and flip them to flower and wait to see for yourself if they grow sacks. (DISCLOSURE: KEEP A CAREFUL EYE ON THESE, ESPECIALLY IF THIS ROOM IS NOT ISOLATED, AND REMOVE MALES QUICKLY.)

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@LVCO710 do you think the sex testing is ever worth it? I too have wondered in what instance a person would want to spend the coin on that?

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I believe in small batches with Non-Fem seeds, and proper test taking training, yes it could be worth using phylos, or another sex testing facility. Also, if you are in a situation where you are on a time crunch / space crunch, I could see the benefit in using them or a different company. If you are doing anything on a commercial scale, my suggestion would be to find or create a designated space (quarantine space) to visually inspect in house large quantities.

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I only say “Non-Fem” seeds because like you mentioned above, I too have had pretty great success with Fem Seeds, to where I wouldn’t waste the dime to test them.

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Great feedback. Is $10 the max you would be willing to pay for fast accurate results?

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Well for us being a commercial facility, we bought the tests in bulk which broke down to be $10 per test, but I think normally they are 12-15$ if you buy in less quantity (less than 100 at a time). Plus you gotta factor in the cost of shipping, and the time cost of waiting for results.

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Great point. I hadn’t considered the shipping costs. Did you typically overnight the package? If so, how quickly would you get results?

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Yea so thats a grey area, we did always overnight them due to the nature of what we were mailing, and we would typically see small batch results back in 4-5 days. Later on when we were sending larger quantities, we saw more of a 6-8 day turn around. Results were always posted online, but we did find that it was totally on us to keep track of matching the test numbers on the individual samples, with our phenotypes. Again in small batches no problems, but in large quantities it became someones full time job.

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Wow. Someone’s full time job? Is that still the case with the quarantine space method you use now? Seems like sexing plants is a major time suck either way. No wonder so many grow from clone or fem seeds. May I ask why you grow from non fem seeds. Is the added hassle of sexing plants worth it?

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Well with doing it in house, we have integrated it with our breeding department. Though it still takes some careful and constant watching, we are able to track much more easily not having to send off test and wait for results. We have also gotten on a perpetual cycle which has been working well for us. We grow with non-fem seeds because we do ALOT of breeding in house, and we don’t feminize any of our crosses, yet. I will disclose that I recently moved from that particular company in CO to join a new Company in LV, but if you or anyone else is interested you should check out Golden Vibe Seed Co. on Instagram. That is my breeders company back home that just launched last week, and is about to start releasing commercially tested “bangers”.

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Back home in Colorado?

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Yea home is Colorado.

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Nice! I’m about 40 minutes east of Pueblo! I’ll have to check them out man! Now if I could only talk you guys into running autoflowers :grinning:

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Visual inspection here. I’m currently doing so with 3 nice looking plants right now. I’m running out of room so I may just flower them but other times I’ve put them back to veg after finding hairs.

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I have definitely done a little of this myself in the past as well with good success, the only thing I would suggest in this senario is to take cuttings from those plants before putting them in flower because I have seen that when you put the plants back into veg cycle it tends to stress the plant out. This could cause herms or possible lock-outs that could cause problems down the line so having the clones before hand could save you from possibly losing the strain.

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Great idea. I’ve just started cloning and my last batch of 13 were all successful. It’s a powerful feeling to reproduce like this!

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Oooh this great!

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