Month: June 2023

Cannabis seeds, also known as weed seeds, are the tiny reproductive units that give rise to a mature, flowering marijuana plant. Reputable seed brands spend a lot of time stabilising their genetics to produce premium, consistent seeds that the grower can replicate in the grow room.

Start by germinating the seeds in a cup of water or in moist kitchen towel until white roots reach 2-3mm, then carefully transfer them to soil pots.

How to Grow

Whether growing indoors or out, you can get great results with professionally bred cannabis seeds. Genetics determine how easy a strain is to grow and how big your harvest will be.

You can also minimize headaches with feminized seeds, which ensure that every plant you grow will be a bud-producing female. Another way to get a consistent yield is to start with clones.

A clone is an exact copy of the mother plant, so it has the same effects and characteristics as the original. Clones are especially useful when you want to replicate a specific phenotype. For example, you might want to recreate a classic like Orange Bud that has a high THC content and lots of CBD. The clone will produce a harvest of buds with the same taste, aroma and cannabinoid profile as the original. It will also grow quickly and mature much sooner than a seedling or a regular feminized plant.

Preparation

There are a number of ways to germinate cannabis seeds. The most common is to put the seeds on a plate between two pieces of wet paper towel. The seed embryo absorbs the water and grows, elongating and sprouting. This takes 24 to max 48 hours. This is best done in a dark place on room temperature.

The seeds can also be put on multiplication gels which will multiply the seeds into many copies of the original sprouting seedling, reducing the number of plants you have to transplant to soil later. You can also plant the seed directly in soil. Just make sure that the soil you use is rich in nutrients and has a high humidity.

Feminized cannabis seeds are those that have been specially processed to remove male chromosomes, which will ensure that every sprout is a female plant capable of producing buds. However, the germination process will still be required. Alternatively, you can grow a cannabis plant from a clone. This can give you an exact copy of the original plant in terms of flavour, effects and yield.

Germination

Germination is the first step in growing cannabis seeds and getting your premium genetics off to a good start. The most common method for germinating seeds is soaking them in water, which makes for an easy setup and low risk of rot.

The best way to do this is in a germination station, which has trays for your seeds and a heat pad beneath to keep the soil warm. These are often easy to find at your local gardening store and make the germination process much smoother.

Another common method is to put the seeds between moist paper towels, which has a lower risk of rot but requires a bit more monitoring. You’ll want to check the paper towel every other day and make sure it isn’t getting too dry, as this can slow the germination process or even cause them to stop altogether. You also need to ensure the seeds are pointed downward, which helps prevent the fragile roots from being displaced during transplantation.

Harvest

Cannabis seeds are inactive until they are exposed to water and light. Once they are activated they germinate and grow into healthy plants. The best place to store your cannabis seeds is in a dark, cool environment like a refrigerator.

Once a seedling has matured, it is ready for harvest. The seedlings will have developed a main cola where the flowers grow tightly together, as well as smaller colas around its perimeter. The bud-producing portion of the plant is known as Sinsemilla, and is responsible for effects such as talkativeness, increased sociability, euphoria, and the munchies.

The flowering phase of the cannabis plant is triggered by reducing the hours of light it receives each day. During this stage, the cannabis plant will stop putting energy into leaf growth and will focus all of its efforts on producing buds. This is the time to harvest the cannabis plant for its buds. Most cannabis seed packets will include a timeline for when your plants are ready to harvest. These statistics are only a guide, and your specific plants may take longer or shorter than the timeline indicates.

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.

Regular seeds can produce either male or female plants. This is why growers who choose this type of seed must make sure that they cultivate enough plants to cover the potential number of males produced.

Male plants pollinate female plants and reduce the final yield per crop, so it is important to identify them and remove them. This can be time consuming and difficult for novice growers.

Breeding

Breeding is the process of crossing plants in order to produce offspring with desired traits. Cannabis is a dioecious plant, meaning it produces male and female plants with their own reproductive organs. This means that in order to create new strains, breeders must isolate and select the female plants and cross them with a male plant.

This can be a time-consuming and messy process, as male pollen will often spread to nearby female plants and cause them to become pollinated (hence producing seeds). Professional breeders usually work in dedicated breeding rooms to prevent this and have people change clothes and shower before working with different branches or areas of the plant in order to minimise accidental cross contamination.

Once the F1 hybrids are created breeders will backcross them to their original parent in order to stabilise desirable traits. This is known as regular seed lineage and can result in some very stable cultivars.

Cloning

Clones are exact genetic copies of a mother plant, so they will carry over all her traits and characteristics. Clones can also be faster to grow and flower compared to seeds. They also take less space because they are biologically mature and already in the vegetative stage. However, growing clones can still be tricky for home growers, as they must work in a sterile environment and disinfect their razors and scissors.

Another issue is that clones can carry pests and diseases from their parent plants. Clones should only be taken from healthy, stout plants that are at least two months into their vegetative cycle and have a large enough branch to cut. Check for signs of disease, like limping leaves, and pests, such as fungus gnats and spider mites, which leave spots and webbing on their victims. Additionally, clones can have trouble rooting properly in the wrong kind of growing medium. This can be a result of improper lighting, temperature, or soil conditions.

Genetic Diversity

Seed size and number are two highly heritable traits whose variation is affected by a large number of QTL. The genetic architecture of these traits differs from that of other life-history traits such as flowering time (Aarssen and Clauss 1992; Kover et al. 2009a). Although a significant negative correlation between seed size and seed number is observed, the correlation is relatively weak and the amount of variation explained by it is smaller than for other life-history traits.

The results suggest that the trade-off between seed size and seed number is not as strong as predicted by theoretical models. They also highlight the importance of examining mating systems to maximize genetic representation in seed collections for conservation targets. The results show that the mating system profoundly affects gene pool diversity and that consideration of this should be a key consideration for designing sampling strategies for ex situ collections. In addition, the findings demonstrate that seed collection from populations and seeds should be undertaken at different times to maximise the chances of capturing rare alleles.

Organic

Organic farmers need good quality seed to be able to produce the crops that their customers demand. They are also required to use seeds that perform well in local conditions. By developing their own organic seed systems – which involve saving and planting on-farm-bred varieties, as well as plant breeding – they can become more self-sufficient and less dependent on a conventional seed industry based on chemical inputs.

While European countries are required to list the organically produced seed of each variety on a national database, it remains possible for farmers to obtain general authorisation to use non-organic seed for a wide range of crop species. This is despite the fact that the new European organic regulation will phase out derogations in 2036. A structural equation model suggests that a farmer’s intention to use organic seed is mainly influenced by his or her perception of societal expectations, in particular those coming from the consumer and their organic certifier.