Regular seeds produce both male and female plants, although they have a much smaller chance of becoming hermaphrodites than feminized seed. However, growers must be careful to eliminate male plants early and focus their energy on the desired crop.
Many growers ask why Sensi Seeds continues to offer regular seed despite the popularity of feminized strains. Here are a few reasons we believe that regular seed is still worth growing:
Stable Genetics
Stable cannabis seeds provide growers with genetics that display a predictable level of consistency in terms of phenotype characteristics. These characteristics can include potency, flowering time, and flavour profile. Stable strains are popular among commercial growers and breeders who want to reproduce their cultivars with the same results every grow.
Breeding stable marijuana strains requires a lot of patience and careful selection. To produce stable strains, breeders first select string and healthy mother plants with the traits they seek in a new cultivar. These mother plants are then crossed with a male that displays the desired traits in order to create a F1 hybrid.
The F1 hybrids are then inbred with each other in a process known as backcrossing to create an F2 generation. This process is very labour intensive and can take up to 12 generations to achieve robust stability. The breeding cycle continues to produce the desired results until the strain is considered stable.
Cost-Effective
While the relatively recent developments of feminized and autoflowering seeds have their advantages, regular seed is still the choice of many experienced growers. When pheno hunting, working with regular seeds is the best way to get a large selection of plants that are genetically intact and worth keeping in your garden. Every plant will differ in growth pattern, development of leaves and stems, aroma, yield, resistance to pests, terpene profile, THC/CBD ratio, and more.
Using regular seeds for breeding can take a lot of time and effort to produce stable offspring, but it is well worth the investment. And since you don’t have to worry about identifying and removing males, cultivating regular seeds is much easier than with feminized or autoflowering seeds.
Less Risk of Male Blooms
Regular cannabis seeds operate exactly how nature intended, meaning there is a 50% chance that each plant will be either male or female. This may seem like a gamble, but weed breeders appreciate the fact that working with regular seed allows them to create the ultimate mother plants that will produce superior clones.
The only downside is that growers will need to spend more time sexing their plants and eliminating male blooms before they flower, which can be tedious. However, if growers fail to eliminate the male flowers, the pollen will pollinate their female plants and result in far lower yields than would otherwise be possible.
This is especially true if the grower stresses their plant with techniques such as topping, fimming, or lollypopping. These stressors can lead to the plant becoming hermaphrodite and producing male flowers that will eventually pollinate the female plants and reduce overall yields. However, this risk is significantly lessened with feminized seeds.
Genetic Diversity
Regular seeds contain both male and female chromosomes (XX) so they can produce either male or female flowers. Feminized seed only contains female chromosomes and will only produce female plants, whereas regular seeds can produce either a hermaphrodite or male plant.
QTL analysis for seed weight and seed number per fruit identifies eight QTL spread across chromosomes 1–5, with the largest one explaining 15% of variation. There is no significant correlation between seed size and seed number per fruit, suggesting that the traits are controlled by independent genetic factors.
Within-site average pairwise Euclidean distance matrices for the MAGIC lines were used to estimate genetic diversity, as this metric is straightforward, requires minimal assumptions and has demonstrated good agreement with more complex metrics. The data demonstrate that, for both H. sericea and H. teretifolia, seedling subsamples at site PT were essentially isogenic and sampling from additional mother plants did not increase genetic diversity. However, seedling subsamples at sites CR and SP exhibited greater genetic diversity when sampling from two or four maternal lines.
