HELP- males with females, pros and cons

[whitewidow33]

hey guys i have 4 lovely female plants about to start flowering and 5 males i am looking to get seeds but it is not a must. My questions are, how much bud mass will i lose if i keep the males? are the seeds easy to separate from the buds (your favourite ways would be great ) can i take pollen from the males and dust some lower buds to get seeds? are the males essentially useless? any help would be great. peace and thank you!

[DoctorWho]

If you leave a male around the girls your buds will be 90% seed.  They can get insanely seeded so your best option would be being a bit selective about the pollination by painting the pollen on the buds manually.  Other buds would get seeded but it won't be too bad. 

 

Harvesting a few seeds is easy, just pull them out as you chop up.  If you have tons of seeds putting the broken down buds in a wire mesh kitchen strainer and moing it around will break down the plant material which falls through the screen.   Stems and seeds get let behind in the strainer which can be dumped on a plate and easily cleaned up.  If you have a crazy amount of seeds a hash tumbler like the one merl1n recommended to me would be the go.

 

For most people males are pointless but they contribute 50% of the genetic material that goes into a strain making them equally important as the girls for making seeds.  Look for traits in the males that you see in your best ladies like similar branching structure,  leaf shape, smells, etc.  You can also smoke them but I wouldn't recommend doing it.  Doing that should select guys very similar to your best girls and that should give you the best seeds possible. 

[whitewidow33]

thank you for the reply doc! helps a lot, lucky i asked this early because the males are starting to flower lots of balls starting too appear hope its not too late. I was adamant to cull the males as soon as i saw them but i considered breeding for next year so i haven't got around to it.

 

Do you have any idea how to manually pollinate? how mature should the male be and so on? thanks again for the info