Jan 16 • Community Build-out Progress
Why STS Does Not Cause Hermies (The Simple Explanation)
Using STS to make feminized seeds does NOT damage your genetics. It does NOT make hermaphrodite-prone plants.
Here's the truth: Hermaphrodites come from bad parents. Not from STS.
How STS Actually Works
Female cannabis plants need a hormone called ethylene to grow female flowers.
STS blocks ethylene production temporarily in the parts you spray.
No ethylene? The plant grows male flowers instead.
But here's the key: The plant's DNA doesn't change. You're not "forcing" anything unnatural, you're just blocking one hormone for a bit.
Think of it like putting a hat on your dog. The dog doesn't become a different breed. It's still the same dog. When you take the hat off, it goes back to normal. STS is the hat. The genetics stay the same.
So Why Do People Think STS Causes Hermies?
Because they used unstable parents.
If you breed with a plant that has hermaphrodite tendencies (even hidden ones), those seeds will hermie too. Doesn't matter if you use feminized pollen or regular pollen. Bad parents = bad seeds.
The root of the problem was the lack of stress testing in the early 2000s:
Stress testing takes forever. Each stress can take 1-3 weeks to trigger male flowers. Testing multiple clones properly? You're looking at months, sometimes over a year, before you know if a plant is truly stable. That's expensive. Lights, space, nutrients, time, all tied up in testing instead of producing.
Most breeders skipped it. They most often reversed whatever looked good, made thousands of seeds, sold them fast, and moved on. When those seeds turned hermie under stress, growers blamed feminization instead of lazy breeding.
The market was flooded with garbage feminized seeds in the 2000s-2010s because almost nobody was willing to invest the time and money into proper stress testing. It was faster and more profitable to just pump out seeds and let customers deal with the consequences.
That's why the myth stuck.
What Proper Breeding Looks Like
- Clone your female candidate multiple times
- Expose those clones to every common stress (light leaks, temp swings, nutrient issues, root binding, etc.)
- Wait 1-3 weeks per stress test
- Only breed with females that stay 100% female through ALL tests
Yes, this takes longer. Yes, it costs more.
But this is the difference between garbage seeds and genetics people will thank you for.
At the End of the Day
STS is just a tool. It doesn't create hermies or damage DNA.
Bad breeding practices create hermies. Lazy growers who skip stress testing create hermies.
If you start with stable parents and use STS correctly, your feminized seeds will be just as stable as any regular seeds, maybe even more stable, because you actually tested your parents.
So stop worrying about STS.
Start worrying about whether your parents are truly stable. :D
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Why STS Does Not Cause Hermies (The Simple Explanation)
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