Whether you’re cooking up some edibles, rolling a J or filling a bowl, regular seed is vital to your crop. Without it, you can’t create the strains of your dreams!
Regular seeds operate exactly how nature intended them, with a 50% chance of emerging as either male or female plants. This is great news for breeders, providing superior clones.
Breeding
There are a number of benefits to breeding your own strains from regular seed. For one thing, feminizing seeds can save you some time and effort by eliminating the need to manually sex your plants. This can increase your yield by about half since all the seeds are female and you don’t have to grow and clone male plants.
Feminized seed also makes it easy to get an even amount of male and female plants from a pack, which is ideal for commercial growers who want a specific ratio of female to male plants. However, the odds of getting a male plant with a pack of feminized seeds is lower than with regular seeds, so it may be worth trying a few packs to see which ones work best for you.
When you use regular seed to breed your own strains, you can select the best specimens based on their terpenes and high-CBD content and cross them with your chosen female plant. This will create the new cultivar you’ve been dreaming of.
Cloning
Clones are a great choice for growing cannabis because they are a reliable, low-maintenance way to produce large harvests of high-quality buds. Clones are produced by taking a cutting from a mature plant and nurturing it into a new crop of buds.
When picking out a mother plant to become your clone, look for healthy, robust branches with plenty of “eyes.” A good cut is a clean, blocky piece about 1.75 ounces in size that has at least two nodes.
Rooting mediums for clones include rooting cubes, rockwool, and peat-based alternatives. Avoid putting your clones into loose soil, as this can cause them to be dislodged and damaged. Using a rooting medium will also reduce the risk of pathogens being brought into your crop from outside sources. This is why it’s important to ask where your clones came from and what integrated pest management programs they have in place.
Flowering
With regular seeds, there is a 50% chance that each seed will germinate as either a male or female plant. This can be frustrating for some growers as it may require a lot of time and effort to cull all of the male plants in a large crop. However, the good news is that when a grower harvests from a predominately female crop they will enjoy higher quality buds and more yield.
Feminized seeds, on the other hand, are a more reliable option as they only produce hermaphrodites. However, this is not without its drawbacks as feminized plants are less suited for breeding and may have lower yields than their regular counterparts. Ultimately, whether you choose to plant regular or feminized seeds will depend on your growing experience, desired yield, and flowering time. Our Herbies strains have their flowering times specified in each of their characteristics, making it easy to find the right seed for your garden.
Harvest
In the natural world regular seeds work how nature intended. They have an equal chance of germinating into male or female plants. This makes them ideal for pheno hunting and providing superior clones. Using regular seed to cultivate out large selections of male and female plants is very useful when working with a breeding program. This can save time and money by eliminating the need for sexing. This saves on wasted hydro system space, use of nutrients and growing medium.
Another great benefit of working with regular seed is that it’s much easier to grow a pure strain from the female plants grown. The female plant is more resilient during the growing process and can help to produce a high quality harvest of buds. Regular seeds also give growers and breeders more control over the quality of their final product by allowing them to select specimens that exhibit the desired characteristics (e.g. terpene profiles, height, flowering times). This allows them to create the strain of their dreams.
