NL#5xH

Hi Tompa,

I'm a retired Maths teacher and I had a look at a table of binomial probabilities to see if getting only 5 females from 16 seeds was satistically significant or not. Just the sort of thing Maths teachers should be discussing with their pupils IMHO, though I suspect it wouldn't do a lot for their chances of continued tenure...

Without making detailed calculations I suspect not and the quality control chappie / lassy at Sensi won't be in a tizz. My tables don't list n (seeds) = 16, but with 20 seeds the situation is that you run a 6% chance of getting only 6 females or less and a 2% chance of getting only 5 females or less. At the 5% level usually chosen for statistical signifcance the first result would give no cause for concern while the second would.

In other words about 5% of Sensi customers would expect to do about as poorly as you did, or equivalently you can expect to do as poorly once in every 20 purchases. Since you've been purchasing eleven years back now it's very likely that you should have eventually got hit with a poor result.

This assumes an equal sex ratio, which as you probably know isn't so in nature and even less so in controlled enviroments. This is because the sex of a plant is not merely a question of genetics but also of enviroment. If conditions are good the plant is more likely to go for girl which, as with humans  is harder work . I'm new to canna, though I am a hobby gardener, and I should think if you were to plant individual seeds in pots with say 6 inches tap root depth, which strikes me being quite a good idea giving the virtually 100% germination success with cannabis seed merchants, the good ones scrutinising seeds individually for viability, then you would be moving to 60% or more females at least, and if that's the kind of results you've been getting then this single poor result certainly becomes significant.

Incidentally if you're not getting virtually 100% germination success, then that's probably because you're using one of the many soo completely weird germination methods you see on the net. What you should basically be doing with seed IMHO is EDIT! {push into some earth, water it well and then forget about it a week or so}} Sorry to interrupt your thoughtful and well-constructed post, but we must point out that your germination method is definitely not the one recommended by Sensi Seed Bank.

We would always advise growers to germinate seeds in moist tissue, between two plates, before sowing them. (see diagram: http://www.sensiseeds.com/ml/shop.asp?MainLev=9&nfoID=14)

This method gives seeds an ideal germinating environment - darkness, plus the right balance of moisture and air. Within 1 to 7 days, seed casing will split and the first millimetre or two of root-tip will emerge.

At this point, seeds should be carefully removed from the tissue and sown (root down) in the planting medium, to a depth of 2 to 5mm. This way, you are only sowing seeds which you know have begun to grow. When sowing ungerminated seeds, you are only sure germination has begun once you actually see seedlings emerge from the medium. EDIT ENDS!

(actually I find canna takes 5 or 6 days, but I use a propagator - seed tray with plastic lid)

It's interesting to look at the problem from a slightly different viewpoint: how many seeds should Sensi send out to ensure that their customers end up with at least 5 females (bearing in mind that their cheaper rivals such as Nirvana send out 10 seeds from which you would 'expect' 5 females)?

As put it can't be answered. Even if Sensi were to send out 100 seeds it can't guarantee that not all of them will turn out to be male, even though the chances of that happening are astronomically infinitesmial. Useless information but maybe more enlightening with a toke: your chances of winning the lottery, 6 numbers from 49, which is about 1 in 14,000,000, is roughly the same as germinating 23 seeds to find all are male (note Sensi - good selling point) or about 6 times slimmer than your being a Twin Towers victim (fatality) on 9/11. Still doesn't stop me doing the lottery because I'm not stupid, damn well could be me as well as anyone else.

Rephrase the question like this: given that Sensi is prepared to dissapoint no more than 5% of its customers (ending up with only 4 females or less), how many should they send out? Well, again without making detailed calculations, it turns out from the above that they should send out about 17 or 18 seeds, and that's probably why they choose this number in the first place, though I really can't understand why from a marketing point of view they don't just make it 20 seeds. Everyone knows that Sensi has the highest quality seeds (and ought to know they would be protected by patent if the law wasn't so f**king stupid) and that they are correspondingly twice as expensive. Surely if they got twice as many seeds by way of return Sensi would attract more of the custom going to Nirvana? And god Nirvana has some custom - check their site and see how many are online and how many millions of orders they've taken in the past few years?

By way of contrast, about 42% of Nirvana's customers end up with only 4 females or less from 10 seeds, and about 5% of their customers are getting just 2 or less from their packets of 10.

I'm also a huge fan of NL#5 x Haze, although I'm basically into body stones for starters and finishers. My experience with growing it is that I paid 150+ Es for it on a visit to Amsterdam three years plus back, and then coudn't be arsed to construct a grow room. But I live in the depths of the French countryside and while like most users I can take canna or leave it, all things being equal I'd rather take it than leave it. Problem: out here the only canna you can get is the legal hemp stuff they still grow here (good for guerilla gardening I suppose, especially if you can find a sympathatique farmer: perhaps the fields round here have been full of the stuff all along ) and in the end I constructed a grow room in the attic.

By that time only 8 from 18 seeds germinated, and of those 5 were female and of those 1 leant to Indica and the other 4 were Sativa, 2 of them being considerably superior in buddings sites. I'm afraid I didn't come even close to completing any of these, but I easily regenerated the Indica from the second internode (2 weeks) and then easily struck two cuttings, again from the second internode (2 weeks in a propagator), and these are now flourishing and here's hoping I have better self-discipline this time round .

I'm at rinpoche_REMOVE_AT_spamcop.net and my blog is at www.vanyka.co.uk (bollocks if you're a policeman, I don't care, bad laws bring the law into disrepute and it is our solemn duty to break them, especially if it's fun)and I would die to have a job in Amsterdam. Mid- fifties something. Ook mijne moeder Nederlandse was en ik een beetje Nederlands kan praten.

Legalise pot, ban booze I say!

cheers,

William Boyd

Hi Feline

Always nice to chat Maths with someone who's had a fair go at the problem on her own acount first.

What you're doing is insightful enough (congratulations - you've discovered the fundamental multiplicative principle of enumeration for yourself, keeping company with - probably first - Isaac Newton himself if you're curious, and if you're young that strikes me as a pretty good start) but you're counting permutations rather than combinations - to explain, suppose the winning numbers were 1 through 6 in any order: but you're counting 2,1,3,4,5,6 as different from 1,2,3,4,5,6 which of course you shouldn't oughta. Solution: work out all the different ways of perming 1 through 6, which by the Newton-Feline multiplicative principle alluded to is 6x5x4x3x2x1, and divide to get 1 in 14,000,000 approx as claimed, and incidentally the method yields a formula for Newton's celebrated binomial coefficient nCr, the number of ways of selecting r (here 6) objects from n (here 49) objects and which you get on most scientific calculators these days, and which is the basis of Tompa's original query. By contrast you were calculating nPr, also on calculators.

Off topic, but continuing on the lottery, I really do do it - by no means being one of those dreary people who authoritively explain the chances of winning are infinitesmial, thousand or tens of thousands of chances slimmer than being hit by lightening in your lifetime, whatever. Well, I just fancy winning it, and people who really believe they should live their life rationally should get an irrational life and be happier IMHO. What really counts is whether you get back 14,000,000 Euros or not for your 1 Euro stake, and of course you don't but what you do get back is good enough for me and as it happens sometimes the jackpot does climb to these dizzy heights or beyond, in which case you're definitely stupid not to, and the fact that millions and millions do when that happens, of which frankly few can know much about binomial coefficients, strikes me as good evidence for the optimistic viewpoint I subscribe to, against it has to be said sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that we're not all as dumb as smart people say we are . Scratch cards are different - that's sad, as is gambling in general unless you really like playing cards, following horses etc. and prepared to pay a bit for your hobby like any other hobby. But what's the joy of scatchcards? Sad, sad, sad.

Regards to Sensi's blotting paper method I would say that I really can't see the point for the experienced cultivator. It seems to me to boil down to whether you're more likely to damage a two day old seedling than a seven day seedling and to be fair to Sensi I can imagine that for most of its customers, who are probaly not gardeners, the blotting paper method is surer since clumsy transplanting will lose you your seedling - compress the stem or lose the taproot then that's it, kaput seedling.

You certainly wouldn't want to bother with blotting paper germination if you like to bed out, as I do,  hundreds of snapdragons etc. in spring, and since I'm a hopless blogger and it's very much easier to do than the gardening books make out, here's how. 1. Sow your seeds on a the surface of a good seed compost in your propagator tray, which incidentally you must drill drainage holes in the bottom, quite a few an inch or so apart, which normally they don't have 2. put lid on, put in shady place, forget a week or so until hundreds of seedlings appear 3. take lid off, put on windowsill, no doubt same front facing windowsill you're warming your canna cuttings with sign GOOD WEED PLANTS FOR SALE (just joking) 4. keep misted and occasionally water by immersing tray a few minutes in a shallow sink of water 5. do not thin the seedlings as gardening books boringly advise, that tray is going to get pretty crowded but those plants will simply stop growing, of course you don't try to feed them, and stay viable for months, clear through the season in fact 6. as May approaches put out to 'harden', important, but keep an eye on the weather forecast and use your own judgement, ready to bring them in at the slightest sign of frost 7. of a nice backbreaking warm May day plant them out - basically you just turn the lot out of the tray, incredibly matted with roots, and then tear them out 'gently but firmly' from the root mass one by one - the young plants have such well developed root systems by now they can withstand the trauma 8. plant a few extra somewhere out of sight to fill in the gaps caused by failed plants, nowhere near as many as a beginner might think 9. 10. and onwards - enjoy from June on.

I take your point about 65% female sex ratio. I can't get it from tables and I'm too lazy to work it out (a few minutes and a bit tedious, but at my age I like to conserve my creative talents strictly for really hard things like Riemman Zeta  : a million dollars on offer for it from the Clay foundation - have a go, it could be you, why not ? but be warned the prize was claimed this year, but no one thinks the claimant has actually done it though he's certainly the real thing Mathswise OK) - method : 1. get really really stoned last thing at night 2. sleep a few untroubled hours blissfully 3. get up about 5 in the morning and do your thing Mathswise, whatever,  a couple of hours 4. forget Maths, whatever, rest of day,  and recommended likewise for whatever your thing is) but I should think Tompa's result is now significant.

I'm sure Sensi employs someone who does all these calculations. if not would be happy enough, for a small seedwise consideration , to do it for them.

Actually I went back to Sensi yesterday to order some Hash Plant, first order in three years, and I notice that in fact they send out seed in packets of 15/16 and not 17/18 as I thought I had remembered.

Regards to all in forum.

sincerely,

William Boyd

www.vanyka.co.uk

Actually, the hermaphrodites are far more unusual than the variation in phenotype that you've observed.

All cannabis has the ability to turn hermaphrodite in order to survive difficult seasons. Sensi has removed the tendency from our strains wherever possible, but we can't eliminate it entirely (however, it's possible to greatly increase the tendency with 'feminised' seeds).

It's certainly not correct that the variation in phenotype shows that Jack Herer is an unstable strain, or in need of renewal. A sativa/indica hybrid that is as finely balanced as Jack Herer will always show some variation, with offspring leaning slightly more towards indica or sativa, leading to variation in height and speed.

There are no balanced indica/sativa crosses (that I know of) that will produce identical, homogenous plants from seed. There are precious few straight-indica hybrids that do this. And if you're making a breed that expresses qualities of strains as starkly different as, say, Cambodian and Afghani, then it's all but inevitable that contrasting qualities will jockey for postion in the offspring.

NL5Haze definitely shows variation. Certain things are true of all the phenotypes - they gain a LOT of height in flowering; produce long, feathery, yet heavy buds; have a long flowering time - but the amount of height a particular seedling will gain, the flowering time, the resin production, will vary from plant to plant.

We've grown about 40 different female Jack Herers from seed, over the last year (seedlings were the result of germination tests). We flowered most very small, and ended up with a few phenotypes that fitted into about four broad categories. There was definite difference in height and speed of the plants, as well as density and resin content of the buds.

If you were looking at the variations more closely, you could probably identify eight broad types.

However, if you were looking at the more general growing pattern, you might fit the forty seedlings into two broad categories - indica-dominant or sativa-dominant.

In another way, every one of the forty plants had indiviual qualities and was subtly different from its seed-sisters.

Frankly, I'm not sure I'd be as interested in a multiple hybrid that turned out absolutely identical plants. This is what cloning and/or landraces are for. The serendipity of insane mutant plants is one of the great things about growing cannabis from seed

JFTR, the forty female seedlings came from 3 packs (48 seeds) of Jack Herer germinated over about a year. This works out to only one male in six! Perhaps Vankya will calculate the probability of this? [but don't feel obliged]

This is not, of course, the ratio that we would advise our customers to expect. But it may lend weight to the idea that careful, loving (!) treatent of seeds and seedlings can lead to a significant increase in the proportion of females.

I'd normally agree with the position that favourable conditions cause a slight percentage increase in the number of females (as reported by Swiss growers), but it's also interesting to note that older, more experienced and caring growers (and often, non-commercial growers) seem to routinely beat the 50-65% female proportion that we advise customers to expect.

At the Museum, our overall outcome is more like 80% female. We have had one or two packs of seeds over the years that turned out mostly male, but they are far more unusual that packs that turn out predominantly female.

We can't really turn this into hard, bankable information, but on general principles, [we'd advise that the number of females that a grower ends up with is directly related to how much God(dess) loves them, and whether they have chosen the correct religion. ***THIS IS A JOKE!***]

i want to smoke african grass...grew by sun not by lights..

I ALWAYS STAND FOR OUTDOOR PRIDE

unfortunately in italy is PROHIBITED to grow grass..and people every year lose plants because somebody go and rob them...so i'm trying to have greetings from indoor with my first growbox

no victim-no crime

i know of italian scientists that realize to grow THC in an other plant, not in cannabis

absurde!!!

Yeah, great thing to grow tomatoes right in front of everybody bristling full with THC