Ask Butterflies about her world

[lutra]

Read something about seeds from Holland (you wrote it being in dialogue with MLA earlier, I thought) and I though, can you easily 'sex', or see the difference between a female and male plant, so you only have to harvest the females in the end? How to do that properly, earlier on? (since growing from seeds will give you either sexes in the end of course and yeah, the males plants are pretty useless)

Shitty question? Um, press ctrl/alt/WTF.

['Butterflies']

Read something about seeds from Holland (you wrote it being in dialogue with MLA earlier, I thought) and I though, can you easily 'sex', or see the difference between a female and male plant, so you only have to harvest the females in the end? How to do that properly, earlier on? (since growing from seeds will give you either sexes in the end of course and yeah, the males plants are pretty useless)

Shitty question? Um, press ctrl/alt/WTF.

There is no way of seeing the gender of a plant that hasn't started flowering yet. The trick is to start by growing twice as many plants as you would like to harvest, but plant them in smaller pots.

Only once you decide to make them flower can you tell what sex it is. As soon as you see that a plant is female, you pot it into a bigger pot. If you see that a plant is male, you either dispose of it, or keep it for breeding.



There are a couple of other options. The seed companies sell "feminized" seeds, which means that they have been specially bred to be females. That is done by using light to force a female plant to become partly hermaphrodite, allowing the plant to be bred with itself, thus creating a clone. All of the seeds from a plant that has been bred with itself will be female (or I presume male, if the original plant was a male that was forced to grow some female flowers.) The problem with this is that you cant really breed these feminized seeds, so you would have to keep buying more seeds from the company.

The other option, and this only works if you are planning on growing huge plants, is to force the plants to flower when they're really young. This allows you to weed out the males. As soon as you do that, you can force the plants to stop flowering again, making them grow fast safe in the knowledge that you will only be growing females.


To "force" a plant to flower, or to stop flowering is very simple. A plant that recieves under around twelve hours light a day will stop growing fast, and start to grow flowers instead.
A plant that gets 16-18 hours a day will not grow any flowers, but instead will grow fast.


Sorry for the essay

[Parts]

Your in Northern Ireland correct?  They had two bombs go off in Londonderry tonight nowhere near you I hope.  They don't have much of this shit happening there anymore do they?

['Butterflies']

I am in N.Ireland. Its a tiny country,so Im not far from anywhere, but Londonderry is probably as far away from me as its possible to be.

Sadly incidents like this are common, although deaths from bombs are fairly rare.

Small pipe bombs  are common, even in my own town. My town  is on the railway line from Dublin to Belfast, and it is regularly targetted, although thankfully its mostly hoaxes aimed to cause disruption.

The people who have it worst are Catholic Police. They are usually the biggest target of Republican terrorists. At least a few police officers get killed each year.

[Parts]

Don't hear much about it in the US anymore.  Too bad they feel they must do these things.  They should let all the people who feel so strongly go to some island so they can fight without any innocents in the way

['Butterflies']

I fully agree.

You dont hear much about it because thankfully the days of the huge bombs killing lots of people are over.
Nowadays its small bombs, or a couple of dead police.
The IRA have declared a ceasefire, so its only the real hardliners who think the IRA were too soft who continue the fight. I dont think theres too many of them.
Personally I have no problem with a united Ireland. I just detest people continuing to use violence to try and achieve that.

Scotland is holding an independence referendum in 2014, and people are commenting that this is a bigger threat to the Union than the IRA ever managed, and without killing one person or disrupting any lives.

[lutra]

Not sorry for the essay, I am. Perfect answer to my question, I reckon.

'The other option' I knew of but even then it's not that easy to recognize the difference in sexes.

Common practice here is to use cutlings from a nice female plant and grow mature ones from them. Cutting 'slips', is that the term?

Mmmm, once, long time ago, made quite a bit of dollah in a house that was bound to be demolished (later on). Those were nice days.. and it was so easy back then.. but not so any more, here, nowadays.

Well, thanks for your answer. Hope next 'season' will provide a nice sunbathed/open air 'natural' one for me. Big fail last year here. Too wet, rot early on, fail.. 

[Scrapheap]

i would make a great pet

You look like one.   

[Queen Victoria]

Not sorry for the essay, I am. Perfect answer to my question, I reckon.

'The other option' I knew of but even then it's not that easy to recognize the difference in sexes.

Common practice here is to use cutlings from a nice female plant and grow mature ones from them. Cutting 'slips', is that the term?

Mmmm, once, long time ago, made quite a bit of dollah in a house that was bound to be demolished (later on). Those were nice days.. and it was so easy back then.. but not so any more, here, nowadays.

Well, thanks for your answer. Hope next 'season' will provide a nice sunbathed/open air 'natural' one for me. Big fail last year here. Too wet, rot early on, fail..

Ya'll aren't talking about tea leaves are you?  It's "tobacco" with a distinct aroma, right?

['Butterflies']

@QV. I never touch tobacco. Im a very occasional hash smoker, but Im way too health concious to make it a regular thing. Afew times a year is enough for me. I just grow it for my aunt and unxle.

['Butterflies']

@Lutra. Thanks. Im thinking of growing some outdoors in the summer.
I do make cuttings, and it does ensure that theyre female.
Ive never been able to create anywhere near enough cuttings to make a full batch.

I like to grow many small plants, rather than a few big ones. At the moment, I have around 70 females under one 600 watt light. Ive found that the best possible pots for growing them this way are 2 litre bottles. They are tall and thin, taking up less floor space.

Sadly Im not expecting much success with this batch. The batch is made up of Purple Power, and it is crap. You cant even see THC on the ripe flowers.
We bought White Widow recently, but only ten seeds,  so Ineed to create a lot of seeds before I can grow a full batch of them.
I expect my next indoor batch to be fully White Widow.

['Butterflies']

Also Lutra. A magnifying glass can be a big help if you need to find the genger quicker, and you dont have great eyesight. It can sometimes be possible to see the stamen that indicates its female a couple of days before its visable to the naked eyen

[lutra]

^ I've always really enjoyed 'playing Mother Nature' and taking care of the plants under artificial light. Cos that's what you do basically. Trying to create the best possible environment resembling mother nature indoors.

Don't know the situation but 70 ladies under a 600 watter seems quite a lot of plants under that one light. Maybe, suit self ofc., you could trim your batch (which you say isn't that successful) a little by getting rid off the weaker ones and give the better/stronger ones more intense light that way and perhaps a better chance to grow into something nice. Dunno..

Um, I wrote half an essay (in words/duh) about cuttings but, if you want, you can look for how to properly do it/them on the net (double duh ). Youtube has quite a few vids concerning cuttings too. Success rates can be over 60%, said my employer of the hothouse I worked in earlier, me doing this kind of job there. Plus also too, this plant tends to have a strong will to survive. 

Good luck with it.

P.s. suppose it's fairly okay here (on I²) but be a tadski careful and not too open about this sort of thing in public. Too much honest openness might.... Well, just saying/suit self..   

['Butterflies']

^ I've always really enjoyed 'playing Mother Nature' and taking care of the plants under artificial light. Cos that's what you do basically. Trying to create the best possible environment resembling mother nature indoors.

Don't know the situation but 70 ladies under a 600 watter seems quite a lot of plants under that one light. Maybe, suit self ofc., you could trim your batch (which you say isn't that successful) a little by getting rid off the weaker ones and give the better/stronger ones more intense light that way and perhaps a better chance to grow into something nice. Dunno..

Um, I wrote half an essay (in words/duh) about cuttings but, if you want, you can look for how to properly do it/them on the net (double duh ). Youtube has quite a few vids concerning cuttings too. Success rates can be over 60%, said my employer of the hothouse I worked in earlier, me doing this kind of job there. Plus also too, this plant tends to have a strong will to survive. 

Good luck with it.

P.s. suppose it's fairly okay here (on I²) but be a tadski careful and not too open about this sort of thing in public. Too much honest openness might.... Well, just saying/suit self..

There is no way to fix this crop. The plants are in good health and growing fine. It appears that the seed company was a fraud, and sent us hemp seeds, or something like that.
http://www.amsterdammarijuanaseeds.com/

The site looks lovely and proffesional, but I had a look through the internet and it seems there's something fishy going on.

Because of how poor the seeds were, I looked for a better seed company and found SensiSeeds. We bought 10 White Widow before Christmas which are now growing, and the first few have just started flowering in the last couple of days. I am confident they will be very strong. They already appear to have more THC than the other ones, even when fully ripe.
Today we ordered 10 Durban from the same site, so with White Widow which is a very strong Indica, and Durban which is a very strong Sativa, we should have pretty strong genetics now.


70 females under one light is a lot, and even my uncle thinks I put on too many, but I've always found that I can achieve the best possible yields by growing as many small plants as possible, rather than grow fewer plants, but to a higher standard. As I'm growing smaller plants, it also has the benefit of slightly speeding up production.


I am carefull about secrecy IRL. I figure I'm OK on the internet as I'm hopefully anonymous here. I live in probably the most backward and conservative part of Britain. Growing grass is still seen as a fairly serious crime here, so I'm far more carefull about mentioning it in real life.

[Parts]

Growing grass is still seen as a fairly serious crime here

\

You would think with people blowing stuff up they would have more important things to worry about but it's the same here real crime is just to hard things like multimillion dollar warehouse robberies and a murder  go unsolved in my town but if they think you have weed watch out