Ho do you figure reg seeds are more potent than fem seeds, you may not like shortcuts,but growing in volume and keeping the quality top shelf you cant do it without some shortcuts, I was pretty clueless when I started growing back in 78,you couldnt get any info,help unless you knew someone,now you can google anything and your a so called "expert grower" overnght
These days with the interweb I think you can learn to grow overnight but it still takes a lifetime to become an expert
Currently I have two forms of Peyote Purple. One reg and one fem. The reg measures 22% THC and the fem 17%. Seen this other times with strains like OG Kush and Chem crosses in simple smoke tests where the regs hit harder and smell was louder than them fem. Found Sensi Star to be a fantastic strain as a reg but it's fem version is a shadow of itself. There's only been a handful of times where I could directly compare but when I could, the comparison favored the reg.
IDK if some things today I would call a shortcut compared to back in the day. Like training or pruning techniques are much improved compared to growing unchecked branching for quality and yields. I dont see that as a shortcut. And with indoor growing there's all sorts of ways to speed up the process with improved lighting, premium soils, hydro, etc compared to even 15 years ago I dont consider shortcuts but rather improvements to the process. Just with fems or autos, it speeds up and simplifies yeah but I dont think it improves the end result.
FWIW, and I'm not trying to convince anybody to grow regs if you're into fems. At the end of the day I'm just happy people grow weed no matter what kind of weed it is.
With having males though there tends to be some worry over waste of time, money, & space. And there is but not to a crippling degree. I keep my gardens under audit all the time regarding waste and this is where my current grow stands
I've never had all males. Annually the ratio is around 40% males but I've had some where 8 of 10 were female. This grow the males made up 38% of the germinated seed stock. At the price I paid for my seeds it's around $20-$25 wasted money on male seeds.
Soils & nutes...in my current grow I've lost 20 gallons of soil out of 130 gallons mixed up for the grow to males but the soil wnet to the veggie garden so it really was'nt wasted as in thrown away and not used again.
In nutes I wasted one shotglass full of liquid fish & seaweed on males. I dont use or buy high end hydroshop nutes so really my nute cost is always very low.
Water was my biggest waste since I use RO. I wasted away 35 gallons of RO water on males. And being RO, even with a 1:1 restrictor that water number is actually 70 gallons.
That's all to get to a goal of 10 female plants but got 11. Sometimes I get as few as 8 females but more often than not I hit that 10 female plant goal with reasonable efficiency.
