Looks great man! That's my issue with "feminized" seeds though, that imprint (shocking by whatever method) becomes part of the genetic code and you never know when or how it will show itself. Hermies at week 9 is like you said no big deal, week 5 or 6 is a different story.
Agreed. Hermies at week 4 would be a deal-breaker.
Hemies during the last week? Eh. . .I struggled a bit about whether or not I should even mention these, since I think people could come away with the wrong impression, but I figured it was better to be fully honest and give full disclosure.
Its certainly possible that something I did stressed the plant, so I "made" this happen. All I can say is that I'm 100% sure it wasn't heat issues or light leak during the dark period. I don't think it was nute issues because I fed lightly and never saw any nute deficiencies of any kind. Again, my best guess is that if it is something I did, it was just not enough light to the bottom branches late in flowering.
To be clear, this particular plant was started from "regular" ceeds, not feminized ones. So whatever caused this, it wasn't feminization.
On that topic, some people believe that the process of feminizing ceeds permanently alters a plants DNA, but personally I don't believe that. There is no genetic reason that I'm aware of that fertilization of a plant with pollen from a female plant should alter the DNA of the offspring in any way. Said "feminized" pollen should be an exact genetic copy of DNA from the mother plant, the same as pollen from a true male plant. DNA is a fairly durable molecule, simple environmental stress like light or heat won't change it, especially since organisms have "proofreading" functions that fix most mutations. It takes exposure to "serious" chemical, biological, or radiologic mutagens to do that.
Meanwhile, its normal for females of ALL dioecious plants like cannabis to create some male flowers. They're basically ALL hermaphrodites, and you'll see this in most natural/feral cannabis plants too. In particular, the ability to make male flowers is a normal survival mechanism that all cannabis plants have built into their DNA to help perpetuate the species in harsh conditions. It just happens that this trait has been suppressed in most "drug" cannabis strains by selective breeding so that won't must do it under "normal" circumstances.
But all cannabis plants retain the ability to create male flowers "hardwired" into their DNA, and I think under the right ("wrong") circumstances I think any plant can do so. Many strains have a tendency to throw off a few bananas at the end of flowering, or if you let them go past the end of normal flowering. Also, given how common hermaphroditic cannabis plants are, I think its practically a "given" that in some point in its lineage, probably EVERY cannabis plant has some predecessor that was "fathered" by a female plant.
I think what many breeders/growers are worried about is that if you use plants that easily tend to go hermie as breeding stock, then you're passing off that tendency to the offspring. In other words, you're selecting FOR a negative trait that you should really be selecting against. Many breeders won't use any feminized plant for breeding stock believing that these plants are somehow "weaker" than non-feminized ones of the same line. This may be true, though I've never seen evidence that it is.
In this particular case, again, it just doesn't matter. If these male flowers are actually fertile (which I'd assume is true), AND I let them mature (which will probably take another 1-2 weeks at least), AND I didn't pluck them off or chop the plant, AND there were some other early flowering plant in my flowering area, then this could cause unwanted seeding and pose a real problem. But given that this plant is coming down shortly, and that I have no intention of doing any sort of serious breeding with this plant, it just doesn't matter. I'll keep my eye on this to see what happens, but I'm not even going to bother to pluck off the male flowers.
