Help please !! I got hermies

2 of my lemon skunk seem to of gone hermie balls appearing all over the plants, but i have caught it early can i do anything about it ? if i continue to pick the balls off everyday can i keep the plants ? I only have 2 others so i really dont want to lose these. They are on their first day of week 5 12/12. what does everyone suggest ???

please help asapppp

You've got a few options, none of them appealing. I'll list them in descending order of what I think are best:

a. Kill the hermies, then replace with other plants (possibly clones from your other two). IMO, this is by far the best option. No daily checking for male flowers, no worry about this, and you're ending the hermie-prone line. If it were me, I'd kill the hermies in a heartbeat and move on. Life is just too short to hassle with this.

b. If you like you can chop down one hermie plant, and 95% of the other, leaving just a *FEW* male flowers on the chopped second one to collect pollen from to fertilize a lower branch on your OTHER plants in order to create a few feminized seeds. Whether or not this makes sense depends on how hard up you are for seeds, and how much you love the respective parent plants. Personally, I'd skip this altogether, but you can see "e" for more info.

c. Attempt to pinch off EVERY single male flower from your hermie plants from now until harvest. Depending on how big the plants are, how many male flowers appear, and how diligent you are, this *might* work, though if you really have a lot of male flowers, I'd say its more likely that it won't. Single male flowers can be hard to spot, especially if the plants are big and/or dense, and you only need one to create a *LOT* of pollen to mess up everything nearby. If you really have tons of male flowers, it simply may not be practical to even try to pinch all of them off.

d. Quarantine the hermies into a separate room or move them outside. That way you can at least harvest "something" (albeit quite seedy) from the hermie plants. Note that you don't actually have to smoke them, you can still use seeded plants to made edibles or hash. In practice, if you had a separate grow area or the ability to grow outside, you should probably plant something else there, so I don't think this is actually a practical option.

e. Just let everything go to seed in open pollenization. Seeded bud can still be excellent, its just more work to de-seed it before smoking, and you'll have a much lower overall yield. For what its worth, hermie parents should mean all female offspring, though the offspring of self- or cross-pollinated hermie plants will themselves be hermie prone. On the other hand, offspring of hermie/non hermie crossed plants may be somewhat less hermie-prone. To me, the only way this option even remotely makes sense is if you think the hermied lemon skunk plants are so awesome that you MUST harvest them and keep the genetics, or you feel like this particular cross is going to be awesome. Personally, I strongly doubt it, but that's up to you.

Here's what you need to do without killing your plants.

First shut off your fans, then get 2 garbage bags (1 for each hermie). Put the bags over the hermie plants (this will keep more pollen from hitting your other plants).
Once bagged up move those 2 plants somewhere else to finish budding (remove the bags once they're in their new home). Make sure you keep up on the banana growth to keep seeds to a minimum. The problem with hermies is the bananas that grow between the bud and the stalk, they're impossible to see.

Hopefully your non-hermie plants didn't get too much or any pollen on them and will come out nicely.
If the hermies do have a shit ton of seeds, use them for butter or making hash.

Also just to clarify, seeds from a self pollinated hermie plant are usually hermies, NOT full on females. It is possilbe to get a full on female plant but the odds are slim. I'm not sure what you'd get from a non-herm and a hermie cross but my guess is that the hermie tendancy would still be strong. Plus assuming you use feminized seeds, they have a higher tendancy to hermie anyway.... If this helps any...rather stoned

Thankyou for the replies. I keep trying to way up my options in my head and i still cant decide. does anyone have any experiences with dutch master reverse?

i've seen varied results from DM, haven't used it, but i've had hermies in the past
DM supposedly is best used at the start of flower, not so much for getting rid of balls that are appearing
however, i've seen some claim it shut down rooster production, so who knows? if there was an easy way to deal with hermie balls, we'd all know about it by now

If you pick the balls off the plant are they garaunteed to return?

temp321 said:

If you pick the balls off the plant are they garaunteed to return?

Click to expand...

pretty much, my hermies did that
however, there are hermies that don't keep pumping balls, and some whose pollen won't make seeds
but with 2 hermies, i'd expect at least one to be ill behaved

temp321 said:

If you pick the balls off the plant are they garaunteed to return?

Click to expand...

"Guaranteed". . .no.
But very likely yes.

Again, it depends on how many male flowers you have. If the plant is erupting with them everywhere, then yes, chances are that's going to keep happening and you're going to get more.

On the other hand, if you only see a few male flowers, you do have a good chance of picking them off permanently, or keeping them under control.

Now in fact if you did really only see a FEW male flowers, personally I'd leave 1-2 of them on there in an attempt to create some feminized seeds, but that's up to you.

if you can bear the loss, remove hermie plants from the room with a garbage bag carefully placed over them, and kill them. this is the only way to prevent pollination, assuming that has not already happened. if it has. still kill the plant, or check the hermies over daily to remove any new pollen sacs to minimize seeding.