Growing regular seeds provides growers with the opportunity to experiment and explore a wide range of genetics. They require sexing to ensure only female plants are cultivated, but with time and effort this can be achieved.
However, if a grower prefers to use their growing space efficiently and doesn’t want to deal with the sexing process, they should choose feminized seeds.
Stable Genetics
One of the biggest reasons why breeders prefer regular seeds is that they are stable. Because cannabis is a dioecious plant, which means that each seed can only produce either male or female plants, half of the seeds produced by a batch of regular seeds will be male.
Male cannabis plants produce pollen, which can then be used to fertilize female plants to create new strains of cannabis. When developing a new strain, a breeder will carefully select male and female plants that display the traits they are looking for in their final product. Once they have selected a strain with the desired properties, they can use cuttings from these plants to take clones.
These clones can then be planted as regular seeds to begin the process of creating new cannabis varieties. This can be a lengthy process, but the end result is high-quality seeds that are stable and reliable for breeding purposes. In addition, genetic stability can also be used to preserve strains and ensure that their desirable characteristics are passed down in future generations of seeds.
Variety
While feminized seeds have their advantages for commercial growers, regular seeds are still considered the best option for home growers. They give a higher chance of producing female plants and allow for more experimentation with crossbreeding and genetics.
Whether you’re looking to try something new or simply prefer the taste and potency of regular varieties, Rocket Seeds has a selection of high-quality regular cannabis seeds that will suit your needs. We work hand in hand with a variety of popular seed banks to provide you with the best genetics on the market.
Remember that a company name can only be used as part of a variety name if it is an original, legally assigned name and does not confuse or misrepresent other firms marketing the same variety. Check seed catalogs, journals, or old records to make sure that the variety you want to use has a legal, unique name. The USDA’s Seed Regulatory and Testing Branch can help you research potential conflicts.
Genetic Stability
The genetic stability of regular seeds allows breeders to cultivate cannabis strains with desirable traits consistently. This is particularly important in developing new strains, where undesirable traits may become dominant over time if not bred out of the strain genotype over multiple generations.
Genetic instability is also important in seed quality and performance. Seeds that are less stable are more likely to experience genotoxic stress, which can have long-term implications for plant growth and development.
Growing cannabis from regular seeds requires sexing plants, which involves identifying and removing male plants to prevent pollination and ensure a 100% female harvest. This process can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, but it is essential for achieving optimal flower production. Moreover, hermaphroditic plants have a slight chance of interfering with other female plants and lowering the overall flower yield. Therefore, it is important to select reputable breeders and seed banks that offer high-quality, genetically stable seeds.
Breeding
Because regular seeds contain both male and female chromosomes, they can grow into either female or hermaphrodite plants. Unlike feminized seeds, which are guaranteed to produce only female specimens, growing regular seeds requires that the grower identify and remove hermaphrodite plants or breed them with another strain that produces the desired characteristics.
In general, if you grow a pack of regular seeds and remove the male plants as they emerge, you will end up with about twice as many females as you started with. This is a great benefit to anyone interested in breeding new strains or creating their own cultivars, and is also one of the reasons that some experienced growers prefer to work with regular seeds rather than feminized.
Despite this, growing regular seed still requires that the grower identify hermaphrodite plants by their male flowers and remove them to prevent pollination of the other females. This is an involved process and can take a lot of patience, but it will result in robust descendants that are as close to the original parent strain as possible.
