A little background, I've been a casual soil grower for a long time (off and on since about 1999). My normal process is throw a bunch of seeds (usually bag seed) in pots of soil and let them do their thing. Flower at some point and pull/kill the boys, hoping that I end up with enough females to go through flowering. I've had grows with 90% females and grows with only 1 female... you always roll the dice. I usually start with 10-15 seeds with the hope that I end up with 4-8 good females.

So, I'm uprading my setup now and switching to a DWC setup. I won't bore you with all of the irrelevant details, but basically I'm building a 3 ft (deep) X 6 ft (wide) X 7ft (tall) "closet" in my shed. I'm going to build 4 DWC buckets to throw in there and I want to only grow 4 good females in those buckets.

Here's my challenge, I need to figure out how to get 4 good females to put in my buckets. I don't want to just throw 4 seeds in and hope they all turn out female (they won't). Eventually I'll start buying femenized seeds, but I want to keep growing cheap seeds until I get better with hydro. So I have two thoughts, but I figure there's probably a better way to do this. First, kind of using my old strategy I'll plant a bunch (10-15) seeds in small cups of coco, put them straight into 12/12 and pick out my females once they show sex and transpant straight from coco into the buckets. I'd then revert back to a veg light scheduled and put them back into veg for a few weeks, then flower later. The other thought I had was to grow 4 seeds in the buckets, 12/12 to start, find one or two good females and clone it. I haven't cloned before though, and this would take a lot longer, so I'm not too big on this idea.

What are some other strategies you all use? I know I can't be the only one that has this challenge. Optimally I'd have 2 different areas for veg and flower growing, but that's just out of scope right now (maybe I'll do it in the future).