Fems is slang for feminised seed. A female plant (or branch) is treated so it makes pollen, usually with silver thiosulfate or colloidal silver, and that pollen fertilises another female, or the same one in an S1. The seed carries no Y chromosome, so nearly every plant is female.
In practice
Fems suit growers with limited space who want every plant to flower. A 5-pack of fems should give 5 females. The quality of fems depends on the breeder's choice of which female to reverse: reversing a plant that never showed intersex flowers, over a large test, is careful work; reversing whatever is popular is not.
Don't confuse with
- Regs: regular seed with males and females.
- Herm pollen seed: seed from a plant that threw bananas on its own. It is also "feminised" in a sense, but it is accidental and selects for intersex tendency.
- Clones: identical copies; fems are new individuals.
Myth check
"Fems always herm." Not inherently. Herm-prone fems come mainly from careless feminising and repeated selfing, not from the method itself. Ask for the line's tester herm rate. See feminised seed and sex reversal.
Feminised seed is seed made by pollinating a female with pollen from another female (or itself) that was chemically reversed, so nearly every seed grows into a female.STS (silver thiosulfate) is a silver compound sprayed on female cannabis to block ethylene action and induce fertile male flowers, the standard method for making feminised seed.Sex reversal is chemically inducing a genetically female cannabis plant to grow fertile male flowers, so its pollen can make feminised seed; silver thiosulfate is the standard agent.S1 is seed from a plant pollinated with its own pollen; every S1 seed is female and a new genotype, not a copy of the parent.In cannabis growing, a plant (usually female) that develops both pistillate and staminate flowers or anthers; botanists call it intersex or monoecious expression.Nanners (bananas) are exposed, banana-shaped anthers on a female flower: a hermaphrodite trait, not a normal part of late flowering, and a reason to cull.Herm-prone describes a line whose plants often produce intersex flowers; GenetixBay treats this as a breeding fault and a reason not to breed from it.The herm threshold is GenetixBay's two-tier herm standard: a 10-plant screening grow with zero herms to be featured, then about 150 or more community-grown plants before a line can be Verified under 2% herm rate.Regs is slang for regular seed: seed from a true male and female cross that gives roughly half male and half female plants.
