How many seeds on a plant is too many seeds for maturing?

I'm self-pollinating plants. It's working great, but I went a bit overboard on a White Widow. It must have 500 seeds on it.

How many seeds can you grow on a plant, before their quality is compromised? Here's a couple of typical buds and their seeds, but the plant is covered with buds like this.

I dont think it is to many as having not enough time to ripen. Takes about 40-50 days for seed to mature.
To clean them. Drop them on a clean white bed-sheet in front of fan. Collect the ones closest to the fan and away from the fan till you start coming to very light colored seeds.Compost the light seeds and chaff. This will get rid of many duds. I think of heavier seed as being better. Lighter seed is usually immature.

That's cool! I visualized spending hours picking through them by hand.

Daniel Lawton said:

I'm self-pollinating plants. It's working great, but I went a bit overboard on a White Widow. It must have 500 seeds on it.

How many seeds can you grow on a plant, before their quality is compromised? Here's a couple of typical buds and their seeds, but the plant is covered with buds like this.

Click to expand...

the real deal here is when you pollinate a plant

those that are 'painted' are marked with a tag on the branch and ID'ed

so later you return you know what is what

also where the unmarked pollinated buds are, better lower down and top most

with the seeds mid trunk

the process is

1: leave the seeds on as long as you dare

2: remove the smokeables,(no tag) as the trics ripen to ur color

3: later when the plant is dead-ish, extract from the pot

4: and whip her over a towel or sheet

5: allow to ripen in the sun or warmth and dehusk

6: avoid counting the seeds but use weight is the best method

7: once you have collected about 1-3 pound(usa)

you soon see how you got so ripped of by them seed sellers ....lol

good luck

Thanks for the good tips! The towel sounds really useful.

I actually manufactured a screen under the whole plant in the fabric pot, to catch the seeds that fall. There's several other plants in that room, so if they fall onto the floor they go into the "unknown" bottle.

I was surprised to see, the seeds don't fall on their own. It takes bumping a branch to trigger one to fall. So typically, seeds fall because I'm checking various buds to see which seeds to harvest. But they DO fall. And into the dirt sometimes.

I estimate there's 800 seeds on this White Widow autoflower. And as I was worrying, I seem to be getting some very tiny, but perfectly formed seeds. Normal sized ones too, but the tiny ones are surprisingly small. Look more like fat black sesame seeds than pot seeds.

I also got some small ones on other plants which didn't have that many. So the white widow doesn't prove 800 is too many. But it suggests it.

The fattest seeds I got were on an AK47 that went rodalized because I kept it around too long to see what would happen. It only made 30 seeds on itself, but all of them are nice big ones.

I put some of the tiniest seeds in cubes to see if they sprout.

Tips for newbees who have doubts like I did:

The fastest autoflower you can get will EASILY live long enough make seeds. Have no doubt, I tried the most common 7 varieties. You can probably even get seeds on the fastest autoflower using rodalization, as hard as that is to believe. So if you're growing autoflowers to get the buds, let a couple of buds linger until the plant actually dies on its own. I suspect you'll get a few seeds.

Seed sellers ripping us off you say?

I don't think that. The seeds I got from Europe were really big, well formed seeds. The one for this plant sprouted in 1.5 days! My seeds take 5 days to sprout. Just long enough to cause worry.

And there's a lot of unique varieties in the world. Each seed seller is basically giving away his genetics.

It's also darned hard to keep the pollen in its place. I can't guarantee with absolute certainty that each variety of seed I made is an S1,. despite separating plants into different rooms.

I presume the best seed makers have that under control and don't send out amnesia skunk, or white blueberry.

Of the 7 "tiny" seeds I put in cubes to sprout, 5 have already sprouted. It's only been 3 days, which I consider good. So being very small doesn't seem to hurt White Widow.

I also made a better estimate of how many seeds are on the single plant. It's over 800.

Here's a picture of a "tiny" White Widow seed, a normal one, and an AK47 seed I grew for comparison. The ones I planted were even smaller than this one, like maybe half the volume! So maybe with seeds, size doesn't matter as much as that they look fully formed.

Note: The black spots come off easily. You can see them flaking off the AK47. I wonder if seed vendors have to spray their seeds with a coating to make sure the spots don't rub off? If I bought a $10 seed with no spots, I'd be unhappy.

Considering all the handling the seed vendors need to do, including sorting, inspection by special microscope, maybe coating the seed, and packaging it up to protect against moisture, $40 for 3 seeds of good genetics is a very good deal.

Update: The consequence of a tiny seed now becomes obvious. The inital rounded leaves, which seem to be formed from 2 halves of the inside of the seed, are also tiny.

But the real leaves seem to come in just fine.

Seeds are different sizes, shapes and colors/patterns depending on their genetics.

My best plants have tiny little tan seeds. They sprout in 24-36 hours most times.

Thanks, that's good to know!

I'm Jonny pot seed in Orange County, California. I'm giving seeds away for free.

I hope to get someone to put 6 in their backyard, so we can do the dry ice with fine mesh bag thing, and get some trichrome hash.

Anyone know how much of the finest screen hash you get from 10 ounces of dried pot?

Indica plants seem to hold their seeds and need help to shed them while many Sativas will drop seeds all over later in flower.

Thanks! I hadn't read that anywhere yet.

Makes sense with node spacing, I never thought about it until now

My "tiny" seeds finally germinated, 7 out of 7. The 3 larger ones that were still green germinated 1 out of 3.

Look to me like tiny seeds are fine, as long as they look mature (have the dark spots). You can also tell a perfectly mature seed by how big the navel is. They seem to shrink down to just a tiny circle once it breaks away on its own. Larger seems to mean you pulled it off before it was detached.

I've got 6 other plants of various autoflower types making seeds, and I started paying attention to their seed tendancies to fall, because of what Hillbill said.

They are different! Some stay in their little shells on the plant, and the shells even turn brown with nothing falling out. LowRyder in particular has some seeds completely sealed in the flower sacs. Finished, huge seeds. I had to pull them out. Some seeds peek out with that brown showing, but not as much as White Widow for example. Looking at LowRyder, it's really hard to see how far along seeds are, the buds are just too tightly wound.

Meanwhile, amidst all my prop 64 pot plant wealth, I've learned that many California cities are banning outdoor growing. I have 6 plants at a friends house, outdoors. A cross breed experiment. And I can't find a clear answer on whether my city has banned outdoor growing. It's a gigantic mess. All you can find is the name of the busybody on the various city councils who's fighting to stop prop 64. They often claim someone will jump a fence to get pot. So, just don't let anyone grow it outdoors.

One city banned indoor growing, for 45 days so they can study it. With a 1 year extension if they feel like it. Another charges $451 for a license to grow.

It's all kind to stupid if you ask me. I have a computer nerd friend, 40s maybe, who believes anyone who smokes pot is a low life looser. He says, just look at them!

I keep trying to tell him, you don't even know who smokes pot around you. You simply can't tell. Maybe if you're with them 20 minutes after smoking a lot, you might hear slurred speech. But if you point it out, they'll snap out of it. Try that with booze.

I think pot smokers themselves have created part of the problem, by hyping up how strong it is, how wasted they got, and how messed up their speech is.

A comparison would be if people who drink alcohol liked to hype up how dizzy they got, how many times they fell down, where they threw up, how bad it was for them to be driving around. If that's all people heard about drinking, we wouldn't have a culture of fine wine or beer microbreweries.

Stoners have cast themselves out of the mainstream by their exaggerated antics. Maybe it's time to make less of those young people sitting around wasted videos that end up on youtube?

As a result of this Cheech and Chong effect, there's a lot of unreasonable hostility towards pot. I fear there will be some lawsuits here in California, before busybodies on city councils stop trying to circumvent prop 64.

Morgan Freeman is a long time pot user, but you can't tell from his movies.

If they redo "up in smoke", he'd be a good choice for the lead character.

That would be awesomely epic, I haven't been to a movie theater in at least 8 years but I'd go to see that.

Which would he play cheech or chong ?

Both of course!

Like Eddy Murphy used to do.

More seed info for other newbees like me (I'm lucky old timers haven't laughed at me about all this):

JUST BUY SEEDS FROM REPUTABLE DEALERS!!!

That's my best advice. We need those guys to preserve precious strains over the decades. When you make seeds at home, you're likely to end up with a lot of half-breeds. It's hard to keep multiple plants with pollen, a safe distance apart.

But if you're interested in learning to make seeds, and don't mind getting weaker pot from the seed plants (and losing the pollen plants), and having some of them be untested new hybrids, here's what I've Iearned so far.

If you made some pollen, use it when a separate plant only has the top 1/4th of the white hairs on its buds. When its just starting out making the buds. Then you don't get too many seeds, but you'll still get plenty.

Why not get too many seeds? Less trichomes on the buds. If it's fully covered in seeds, it's going to be weak pot (but apparently still usable). If it's only got 1/4th of what it could, it seems to have plenty of trichomes. Even stickier than with no seeds, it seems to me.

But there is a drawback even if you don't over seed. The pot has to sit a LONG time to mature the seeds. It's going to be well into amber trichome territory. Sleepy weed in other words.

Of course as Vostok (I had a girlfriend from Vladivostok) pointed out, you can harvest smokeable buds before the seeds are done. That seems like an advantage for brushing the pollen on by hand.

When you pollinate buds, you can tell after 2 days which little white hairs accepted the pollen. They start to crinkle up at the top and turn darker. Do a second pollination if needed, but I advise not waiting too long. It's inconvenient for the seeds to mature at different times, on the same bud. Sure, you could wait till all of them mature. But if you're playing around, you're likely to search out buds with brown seeds, and pick those first. And if you pollinated too far apart, you'll have half green seeds.

Green seeds have a terrible sprouting rate. I tested it. One in 20 is my guess, depending on whether they're also well formed.

Of brown seeds, regardless of size, every one I tested sprouted. However, they didn't sprout as fast as the ones I bought from reputable dealers. Mine took up to 7 days for some.

I don't know about saving up pollen in a baggy. I had bad lucky trying to "paint" pollen on with a brush. I even tried adding dry rice flower to get more bulk to work with.

It's too much work, and it's not as easy to get it to take as you'd think. If you do that, be sure to blow on the brush when you're done, in the general direction of the buds. I got more seeds from a brush by blowing than by painting. And it didn't have a significant amount I could see, before I blew.

But the best luck I had was planting 2 Super Skunk plants 1 month apart. 2 months would be fine also, they keep making pollen for a very long time.

I sprayed the first Super Skunk with silver. By the time the second plant had buds, all I had to do was shake the first over it, in a trash can. I estimate 600 BIG seeds on that Super Skunk! I just harvested 60 from a single bud today and got NO green ones, because of the single episode of pollination.

I had so much pollen from the first Super Skunk, I decided to make a hybrid on another plant. That second plant, a White Widow, likely has 1000 seeds. It's really hard to estimate, but my guess keeps going up. The harvested pot is weak though.

No one needs 1000 seeds on a single plant. Better to get less seeds, more pot.

I've read concerns in these groups from people who accidentally got pollen on their plant, and believed the seeds that formed had ruined their hard work to make strong buds.

I personally remember the seed ridden pot from the 70s, so that concern seemed a little unjustified to me. Here's how many trichomes there are on an AK47 bud with seeds, attached to a plant which is estimated to be carrying 200 more. And when it's dried, it's perhaps about half as strong as the best I got from another AK47. That's strong enough, considering you can get S1 seeds too.

There's enough trichomes on there that a fungus gnat has become stuck. See the red circle in the attached foto.

Yuck. I didn't realize that fungus gnats can get stuck. I tried to gently push him off with the point of a toothpick, but he seemed to be hypnotized or something.

Think about that the next time you smoke weed. No one's going to have the patience to remove the gnats that got stuck to your buds.