If you’re a grower who loves breeding your own strains or creating new hybrids, then regular seed is your best friend. They provide strong and healthy clones capable of rooting well and growing fast, so you can make the genetic copies that make your vision come to life.
Before feminized seeds became popular in the 1990s, regular seed were the only choice for breeders worldwide. Today, regular seeds are less popular than feminized seeds, but there are still plenty of benefits to using them.
Stable Genetics
Stable genetics are a key component of cannabis cultivators’ ability to offer consistent, predictable plants to their consumers. However, creating stable genetics is a highly time-consuming and costly process that has yet to be mastered by most growers.
To create a stable strain, breeders take a parent plant that contains the desired traits and cross it with other plants. Over successive generations, the desired traits become dominant in a plant and begin to express themselves, while undesirable traits are gradually eliminated from the gene pool and are no longer expressed.
When breeding, these traits are called phenotypes. When these phenotypes are stable, they produce predictable and homozygous offspring that resemble their parents equally.
Cheaper to Buy
If you’re looking to get the most bang for your buck, regular seed is a great option. These seeds are cheaper than feminized or autoflowering strains, but they’ll still provide high-quality buds that taste and smell good.
If the price of a pack is an important factor in your decision, a good seed bank will be able to help you save money on the seed you buy. For instance, Seedsman is a leading cannabis seed bank with a wide selection of cheap marijuana strains and frequently 30-50% discounts.
The website also offers free seeds on orders over $20, a 40% discount on West Coast strains, and 15% off all Bitcoin purchases. They also have an extensive blog section, worldwide shipping, and a 100% money-back guarantee on all seeds.
Less Expensive to Grow
If you’re on a budget, regular seeds may be the best option. They are less expensive than feminized or autoflowering seed, and can help you avoid the risk of male cannabis plants contaminating your crop.
Regular seeds can also help you develop new cultivars and provide superior clones, making them more appealing to breeders. They’re also more likely to produce female phenotypes than feminized seeds, which means you’ll have a better chance of finding the clones and phenotypes that are most valuable to your cultivation goals.
The other main reason for growing regular seeds is that they are the type of seed that nature would have provided in the first place. They have a 50% chance of becoming either male or female, allowing them to produce the genetic lines that make marijuana such an attractive plant.
More Stable Plant Genetics
Despite what some people might think, there are many reasons why regular seed is preferred by breeders. First of all, they are more stable genetically than feminized seeds.
Stable plant genetics are a critical component of providing consumers with consistent phenotypes when purchasing different cannabis strains. They’re also the foundation for giving a grower consistent results when taking cuttings and clones.
However, the process of breeding plants to impart desired traits into them requires time and patience. It can take several generations before a cultivator successfully produces a stable seed.
This process is called breeding or backcrossing a strain, which involves crossing brothers and sisters to select for desirable traits over multiple generations. Desirable traits become dominant and gradually eliminate undesirable ones.
