Regular seeds produce male and female plants, and offer growers and breeders the opportunity to cook up unique crossbreeds. They also provide excellent cloning materials.
Feminized seeds give you a higher percentage of female plants, so you can rest easy knowing your crop won’t end up with a whole bunch of useless males that will eat all your water and nutrients.
Stable Genetics
Regular seeds work just like they should, germinating as either female or male plants and producing clones that are of high quality. They allow growers to experiment and create the strains of their dreams using a process called breeding, by crossing specimens that produce particular terpenes or highs, for example.
It is important to note that a plant’s genetic stability is character dependent, meaning it is not the case that all characters have a similar response to developmental noise. The consistent differences observed between different characters suggests that the degree of stability is related to a character’s functional importance within the plant.
Breeding is a lengthy process that requires countless generations to produce desirable traits, known as phenotypes. These phenotypes are what we recognise as the characteristics of a strain, such as growth, flowering, colour or psychoactive effects. This means that without regular seeds, cultivators would have a much more difficult time producing their dream cannabis strains.
Easy to Breed
It takes a little more work to breed regular seeds, but it’s well worth the effort for many growers. With feminized seeds, you have an equal chance of producing male plants or females, but with regular seeds it’s far more likely that you’ll end up with the desired ratio if you follow good breeding practices.
Growing a predominately female crop is easier to manage and will help you avoid the potential problems that male plants can cause, such as pollination. It also makes it easier to weed out male plants if necessary.
In addition, cloning is much more successful with regular seed. This allows you to duplicate a specific specimen with exact genetics, which can be especially helpful if you are trying to find the perfect phenotype for your purposes. This can be anything from a unique flavour profile to exceptional potency or colours. Regular seeds don’t suffer from the same kind of genital modification that feminized seeds do, so they are the better choice for breeding.
Less Expensive
Regular marijuana seeds are a great option for experienced growers looking to cultivate a variety of cannabis strains. They aren’t genetically modified, feminized, or crossed with a Ruderalis strain to enable them to flower automatically. They are also used for cloning, which allows growers to make an exact genetic copy of a specimen they like the terpene profile or colour of.
However, despite their advantages over other varieties, they do come with a price. As with all seed types, half of them will germinate as male plants, which means growers will need to weed them out.
In comparison, a pack of feminized seeds run the risk of producing male plants only about a third of the time. This makes them a better option for small-scale indoor operations or those who are legally capped on the number of plants they can grow.
More Resistant
The seeds of regular cannabis plants produce male and female weed. In most cases, a grower can expect to get about 50% female and 50% male marijuana plants. Male marijuana plants, which aren’t smokable, grow pollen sacs that will fertilize female marijuana plants during flowering. Having to cull 40% of your plants isn’t a good use of growing space or nutrients.
The genetics of regular seed mean that the plants grown from it are more resistant to diseases than feminized and other varieties. This makes them a good option if you’re planning to plant outdoors or in conditions that may be exposed to extreme temperatures, pests, or stress.
The level of resistance is defined as either resistance (restricts or slows the development of the disease compared to susceptible varieties under similar environmental conditions and pest pressure) or tolerance (shows some symptoms but no significant losses in yield). Resistance varieties have a higher yield and potency than those that aren’t resistant.
