Feminized Seeds: Everything You Need To Know

If you’re new to growing, or just getting started buying seeds instead of growing from bag seed, you may be wondering about feminized seeds and what they are. This is a common question we get asked by first time growers.

Unlike regular seeds which can be male or female, feminized seeds will always be female. This helps tremendously with space limitations, as you won’t need to pull out or throw away any males in the flowering stage, meaning you can maximize your grow space and increase your yields.

How Feminized Seeds Are Made?

Feminized seeds are made differently to regular ones. In a traditional pollination, a male plant will develop pollen sacks during the flowering process and that pollen will spread to nearby female flowers. This pollinates them, allowing the female plant to develop seeds. The resulting seeds will be a mix of males and females.

In feminized seeds, there aren’t any males used and instead the grower will reverse the female plant so that it develops pollen in a similar way to how male plant would. The reversed female plant’s pollen then seeds up another female plant.

Since male plants have XY and female plants have XX chromosomes, it means every seed resulting from the cross can only ever be XX, meaning it’s guaranteed that each seed is XX (female).

The reversing process used to be done with basic high colloidal silver, but now days products like Reversa Privada STS offer a more modern and effective way of reversing the female cannabis plant.