why take the cuttings if you dont know sex?? why waste time rooting what ends up being a male close?? what you can do to ensure you are only taking female cuttings is this...
take 1 or 2 cutting from each of your main plants... main plants here meaning your vegging plants... make sure you know what plant the cutting(s) came from for later identification purposes...
root the cuttings.. as soon as they are rooted put them under a 12/12 light cycle... this will show the sex of the plant you took the cutting from... this will take about 3 weeks total.. a week to root your clone and another 2 weeks to see the preflowers on them...
this can all be done while your main plants are still vegging and growing...
once you start seeing preflowers, you can identify which plants are males and which ones are females... you can pull the males from the garden even before inducing flowering... that way you know going into flowering its all females.. you wont have the paranoia of watching for males everyday.. now you can take cuttings from the females only, and start the 12/12 cycle on them... i would recommend taking no more than 5 cuttings per female if you plan on flowering them... if you want to strip one or 2 girls totally down for clones and flower the other ones thats another idea... the benefits of taking a few clones from the bottom of each remaining girl is that itll help during the flowering cycle.. you are removing shoots that would normally just waste energy and not produce bud, ones that would prolly get pruned off anyways, so why not put them to good use... the clones you take now are more than likely mature since the plant has had plenty of time to mature itself.. so if you want to as soon as those clones have rooted they can be put into 12/12 with no problem and harvest good mature buds... or you can veg them out and take clones from them knowing you only have females or choose a mother and just take clones from her.. its up to you...
you may have to prune or tie down your "main plants" while you do this if height starts becoming an issue on the first sexing... but if you do this you'll be sure you only have female clones and can be sure you have no males and eliminate the paranoia of having a male pollenate your garden....
i hope i made this understandable.... and that it helps.. good luck
