Choosing the right seeds is essential to any crop. Whether you choose feminized or regular seed depends on where you live, your level of experience and the purpose of your harvest.
Unlike feminized seeds, regular plants grow into male or female plants on average about half the time. This means you’ll need to weed out males to get the most out of your harvest.
Breeding
Breeding cannabis isn’t just for professional growers, many hobbyists who have a bit of experience like the challenge and the excitement of creating their own strains. Regular seeds offer plenty of opportunities to experiment with cross-breeding, as they produce both male and female plants by default.
By selecting the best of your regular sexed crop to become ‘mother’ plants, you can create clones that carry all the robust characteristics of their parents. This is also an excellent way to test for new genetics that you want to incorporate into your own strain.
Similarly, using regular seed can help you stabilise a strain by crossing it with other regular phenotypes to create F1 seeds that exhibit less variability. This can lead to a strain that has much more consistency in terms of yield, flowering time and potency, and it’s something that experienced breeders strive for.
Cloning
Cloning is a great way to get started in the grow room. The process involves taking a piece of a healthy plant and allowing it to root in a nutrient-rich growing medium such as rockwool or clay pellets. Once a clone has enough roots, it can be transferred into soil or another container where it will continue to grow.
Clones are genetically identical to their parent plant so they can be trusted to perform well in a variety of conditions. They can also be quarantined for a few days to a week before being introduced to the rest of your garden to prevent any diseases or pests from spreading.
Clones take longer to root than seeds and can be prone to failure in the wrong growing environment. They must be kept in a clean environment that is free from harmful pesticides and fungicides and can’t be exposed to excessive heat or cold. It is also a good idea to use a rooting hormone to speed up the process.
Medicinal Uses
One of the main uses of regular seed is cloning, which requires female plants with full sets of chromosomes. Many breeders will select the best females from their crop and grow them out to become’mothers’ which can then be used to create a number of identical clones.
This is done to produce a stable strain with the same genetics and robust qualities that the original parent plant had. It also allows growers to preserve the original genetics of a particular cannabis variety in case future generations need to be produced using the same phenotype.
Another reason to stock regular seeds is that male plants have their own benefits, such as producing pollen which can be used for creating new strains of marijuana. Male plants are also less likely to be hermaphrodites and can withstand a number of growing stresses such as sudden photoperiod changes and water shortages, which can cause hermaphrodite plants to become uncontrollable.
Genetics
Unlike feminized seeds that only produce female plants, regular seed produces both male and female cannabis plants. This means that there is a chance that some of the seeds will germinate and grow into male cannabis plants, so growers are advised to purchase a larger number of seeds than they want to plant to ensure that there is a balance of male and female plants.
However, the genetics underlying the natural variation of seed size and number are still relatively uncharacterized, as previous studies have primarily used mutant screens (Garcia et al. 2003; Tzafrir et al. 2004). This is partly due to the fact that seed traits are complexly influenced by both environmental and gene-environment interactions (Koornneef et al. 2012).
For this reason, some growers prefer to work with regular seeds in order to avoid any problems that may be caused by male plants. Also, working with regular seeds enables the grower to see which plants are male or female, and this can be useful when pheno hunting for potential cannabis strains for future breeding projects.
