I'm a newbie here. I've been reading a book, Elite Growing. The author says, among many other things, when a plant has three pairs of true leaves, more blue spectrum of light increases chances of females from your seed. High humidity, lower temps, increasing level of N, lowering level of K, low environmental stress, lower hrs of daylight (14 hrs) and soaking seed in Gibberillic acid. Until you can sex clones, all of these things will increase females from regular seed. Sexing your plants will also cause undue stress, thus the reason for using clones. Great book with a lot of awesome info. The author says true females exist in the gene pool, and only stressing plants to the max will reveal them. Indicas are much easier to identify than Sativas.
I've never read that book, but I hope you're misquoting it.
I'm unsure how sexing a plant causes undue stress... As sexing by definition is "determining the sex or gender of".
I'm also not really sure most of those points are true. All the other things you listed to "increase chance of female" really are only going to reduce stress, so with bad genetics it would avoid a potential hermaphrodite. Treating the seeds prior actually should work, but I have never done that. I really think the previous poster misread the book, or misquoted what he/she read. If not, the dude shouldn't be writing a book about growing.
Especially with bag seeds dude, it's pretty much a tossup on what your actual results will be, even some of the best growers get males man, it's not a perfect science, there is probability involved.
Earlier on there was some dude that said the stretch is completely dependent on distance of the light form the seeds. Absolutely untrue.
Red light spectrum increases hormone production, which while in a vegetative state, with the absence of sexual anatomy, all that hormone development goes into stem growth, which increases internodal spacing. Inernodal spacing is the vertical distance between pairs of nodes on the stem. Since fan leaves directly correlate to nodes, internodal spacing is also the distance between each pair of fan leaves
blue light encourages foliage production and distribution of nitrogen to the leaves. If you were to expose a plant to exclusively blue light it's internodal spacing would be very small, and the leaves would overlap creating more of an umbrella shape bush, stunting the growth of the nodes and decreasing yield. The only argument for giving them some red light while in veg is to make sure you have the space you need for all the leaves to flatten out and receive light.
Most people will say 2/3 of your total light in veg should be blue spectrum (65000k - 10,000k). While some people argue 10,000k bulbs do nothing, it really depends what 10,000 bulb you're using, because they aren't all the same. The inverse is correct for flowering, usually it's suggested 2/3 of your light comes from red spectrum (2700k) bulbs. If you're able to find CFL's with a lower kelvin rating, likely around 2000k, i would suggest using those for flowering. I have even heard of great success using red decorative CFLs as side lighting during flowering (not as a primary light source).
You'll recognize that when your flowers first start to show, vertical growth from the flowering node will decrease. Lots of people report huge growth when they switch to flowering, but that is largely because they change the lights, creating large hormone production, but the flowers haven't formed, so all that hormone growth goes into rapid stem development.
I would suggest starting your flowering cycle (12-12) under 6500k lights and slowly transitioning into a more 27000k friendly setup, like switching out one of the 6500k's for a 27000 every 4-5 days. This will make sure it stays short and bushy, but also ensures that in it's full flowering state it gets the light it needs to produce well.
Hope that helps.
