Unless you buy feminized seeds, it’s likely your new plants will be regular. This means they have a 50% chance of emerging as male or female plants.
Male plants pollinate females, reducing the potential yield of your crop. Identifying and eliminating them early on ensures your harvest is maximised.
Many growers choose regular seed for its breeding potential, creating new phenotypes and strains with desirable traits. This requires patience and cultivation experience.
Breeding
Breeding is the process of combining plants or animals with different characteristics in order to create offspring with desirable traits. This can be done through artificial selection or crossbreeding. Many crops are bred to be more nutritious, resistant to disease, or have higher yields. Breeding also refers to the process of selecting, cloning, and propagating seeds for commercial production.
In traditional breeding, inbred female seed parent lines are evaluated as full-siblings to choose superior individuals that are then recombined with genetically diverse male parent plants. In this process, only a fraction of 2,000 “sister” lines will be selected and ultimately produced as a new variety; the rest are eliminated during the evaluation period for unfavorable agronomic and molecular traits.
A low heritability for germination and emergence traits limits the potential of improving these traits through conventional breeding. However, genetic variation for germination performance is correlated with the allele frequencies of certain marker loci (see Figure 9). Selection for a particular haplotype can enhance germination without negatively impacting essential seed quality traits.
Cloning
Cloning is a form of reproduction that creates genetically identical plants or organisms from a single parent. Clones can be produced from existing plants or from body cells extracted from an adult human or animal. Clones can also be grown in a lab using special conditions.
Clones offer a number of advantages for growers. They are an exact copy of their mother plant so they will grow and flower the same way, and they can be injected with hormones to speed up the growth process and reduce the time to harvest.
There are a few downsides to using clones though. The biggest is that they can carry flaws inherited from their mothers, such as hidden genetic defects or weaknesses to diseases and pests. It’s important to choose a healthy mother plant that has been well-vegged before cuttings are taken. You should also avoid taking clones from a plant that has been exposed to disease or pests, which could potentially ruin your entire crop.
Pollination
Pollination is the process of transferring pollen grains (male genetic material) from an anther to a stigma. This is necessary for fertilization and seed production in flowering plants. Some flowers are able to self-pollinate, but most require pollen from another flower of the same or a different species in order to fertilize their ovules and produce seeds. This can happen naturally by wind or with the assistance of insects or other animals, such as birds, flies, bees and butterflies.
In some cases, animal pollinators are a bit more efficient than wind at moving pollen from one flower to another. This is usually because the pollinators visit a large number of flowers within a given area, increasing the odds that they will transfer pollen to the right flower. However, even “efficient” animal pollinators can sometimes fail to get the job done. This is a matter of luck. It’s also a factor in why some species of plants are unable to reproduce with other members of the same species, such as in the case of solitary bees.
Genetics
One of the most important things to consider when choosing regular seeds is their lineage. To some growers, especially those who enjoy a more traditional style of cannabis, the genetics of each variety is very important, as they look for specific growth, flowering and psychoactive traits that are consistent throughout the strain.
As the name suggests, regular seeds are sown with pollen from a male plant, rather than being subjected to the chemical spraying process used in feminized seed production. This means that there is a higher chance of hermaphrodite plants being produced during the growing process, which can cause stress to your plants and reduce the overall potency of your harvest. As a result, many growers prefer to choose regular seeds in order to avoid the stress and extra work that comes with hermaphrodite flowers. They also offer a more natural approach to breeding, which some find more desirable in terms of the integrity of the strain’s lineage.