Unlike feminized seeds, regular cannabis seeds have an equal chance of producing male and female plants. They are perfect if you want to breed your own cannabis strains.
They allow you to create hermaphrodites and crossbreeds that are full of unique traits. In short, they are a great choice for the discerning grower.
Breeding
Whether you want to create your own strains or simply grow some of our favourite cultivars, breeding regular seeds can be a fun and rewarding process. It can also be a good way to get to know a strain better, experimenting with its characteristics and working out the best traits to preserve for future generations.
To breed your own regular plants, you need to separate male and female plants during the grow cycle and eliminate the males as soon as they show signs of flowering (small pollen sacs). This can be challenging if you have large cultivation spaces, requiring you to invest a lot of time in manually removing the males or using a product like AutoSex or X-Block to prevent them from pollinating your females.
Feminized seeds were created to avoid this issue and can be better suited for commercial grows as they eliminate the need for manual removal of males. However, many growers prefer the challenge of breeding their own strains from regular seed and believe it helps develop the best phenotypes.
Cloning
When growing cannabis, growers often choose to clone their “mother” plants to produce high-quality buds. However, there are several things to keep in mind when working with clones. For example, it’s best to remove all fan leaves from the clone as excess leaf material will divert energy from producing strong roots. Moreover, it’s also important to regularly feed clones with a balanced nutrient solution.
Cloning is an efficient method of asexual plant reproduction. It’s also more reliable than growing from seeds, as you can ensure that your clone will be female. Moreover, it’s possible to take multiple cuttings from the same mother plant, root them and allow them to flower—over and over again. However, this technique is not for the beginner grower and requires careful attention and consideration to ensure a successful outcome. It also increases the risk of introducing foreign pests, mildew or fungus into your garden. Therefore, it’s recommended to grow clones in a quarantine area before adding them to your primary garden.
Experimentation
Many old-school cultivators prefer regular seeds for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is a matter of principle; some cultivators want to keep their seeds unaltered. Other times they simply like to grow their weed the way nature intended it, rather than use chemicals and colloidal silver to create feminized plants.
Theoretically a batch of 10 regular seeds should yield roughly 50% male and female plants. However, this is a big range and can be influenced by luck and environmental conditions.
If you have a few male and female plants, it is easy to pollinate them with one another to create new strains. This is where you can start to build your own marijuana strains with your favorite terpenes and highs. The only limit is your imagination! This is also a great way to preserve the genetics of strains that got left behind in the weed rush of the 90s. Seed banks like Dutch Passion are still offering these strains as regular seeds.
Saving Seeds
Seed saving is the practice of collecting and storing seeds from a mature plant, in order to grow it again the next year. It is an ancient tradition that has provided generations of gardeners and farmers with the seeds they need to sustain their own gardens and farms.
The easiest vegetables and fruit to save are beans, tomatoes, peas, peppers, cucumbers, and watermelons. These crops produce a high percentage of female plants and require no male pollen to be removed, making them a good choice for first-time seed savers.
When collecting seeds, it is important to label them correctly. This ensures you know which seeds to plant and how many of each variety you have saved. It also helps to keep track of how well each variety germinates. The germination rate of saved seeds decreases with age, storage conditions, and original seed quality. Test a batch of seeds by placing them on a damp paper towel in a warm place and checking them after five days.
