Regular seed offers growers a chance to breed plants. This includes making male and female cannabis plants that produce seeds in the growing process.
However, it also means having to get rid of the male plants, which reduces yield levels significantly.
Feminized seeds offer consistency in terms of crop yield, but may not be best for novice growers.
Breeding
Aside from sexing plants to remove males, which can be time consuming and labor intensive for some cultivators, regular seeds are cheaper than feminized or autoflowering varieties. Cultivators who take a more hands on approach to breeding or experimenting with genetics may also prefer the variety, vigour and purity of regular seeds.
Photoperiod plants, like the kind grown from regular seeds, are the best candidates for cloning, providing growers with strong, healthy cuttings that root easily and quickly. This makes them a superior choice for breeding projects that require the preservation of certain genetic characteristics, whether it be for morphology, colour or flavour.
Breeding with regular seeds also allows cultivators to play around with terpene profiles, creating hybrids with indica and sativa qualities or mixing opposing terpenes for balanced cultivars. For example, Mr. Power Planter grew six regular Serious Seeds AK-47 plants in the 56 to 63 day window and harvested amazing main and side colas, packed full of fat resin.
Cloning
Clones are a great option for growers who want a more uniform result from their grow. They offer an exact copy of the mother plant’s genetics which means there is no chance of a hermie (male plant) or crossbreeding. However, growing from seeds can be a lot more interesting and allows for much more variation in plant size, yields and terpene profile.
Cloning is a scientific process that involves adding a gene from one animal to another. Scientists start with a mature somatic cell (such as a skin or internal organ) and add the DNA of another animal to it. The cell then becomes an embryo that can be implanted into an adult female’s uterus to develop into a full-grown organism.
Cloning is controversial because it turns animals into commodities or objects rather than sentient beings. Many people also believe that cloning dehumanizes animals because it removes their sexual and reproductive instincts. However, cloning is not that different from other methods of animal production such as breeding and selling.
Pollination
Pollination is when pollen grains are transferred from the male parts of a plant (stamen) to the female part of a different plant (stigma). This process causes fertilization of the plant’s ovaries, leading to seed production. Plants that do not produce seeds, such as mosses or ferns, reproduce through spores. Other plants, such as conifers and spruce trees, produce seeds through pollen that moves from the male cone to the female cone by wind or animals.
Most flowering crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, cotton, and hay (alfalfa grown for livestock feed) require pollination. Bees and other insects are most commonly used to pollinate plants.
Some species of flowers are self-pollinating; perfect flowers with male and female sexual parts borne close together on the same plant, making it easy for pollen to rub off from the stamens onto the stigma. Other species, such as roses and marigolds, are not self-pollinating, but need to be pollinated by a bee or another insect or by wind or water to create seeds.
Genetics
Since ancient times, humans have recognized the influence of heredity. For example, a Babylonian tablet dating back 6,000 years shows pedigrees of horses and suggests they were bred to enhance their performance. Today, genetics is a central science and has been applied to breeding plants and animals to maximize crop yields. It is also used to develop new strains of cannabis.
The seed size and number QTL were identified using a hidden Markov model implemented in the R software package HAPPY (Kover et al., 2009b). This method reconstructs the genome of a MAGIC line by multiplying probabilities of obtaining each parental haplotype. It then evaluates each marker for evidence of a quantitative trait locus (QTL) by fitting a multipoint fixed-effect linear model.
A strong correlation was observed between seed size and number. However, the low r2 value indicates that variation in either trait explains only a small proportion of total variance in the other. This may be due to genetic pleiotropy.
