Growing regular seeds necessitates removing male plants, and can be time-consuming and difficult for novice growers. However, they provide a greater range of phenotypes that are useful to breeders and expert growers.
Some of the best old-school varieties never made it into feminized form, so using regular seed allows you to grow these classics.
Breeding
Regular seeds provide breeders with a variety of options that help preserve genetic stability and allow for exploration of new strains. Typically associated with reputable seed banks that prioritize customer service and frequent cannabis cups, these seeds are an excellent choice for growers who want to work with stable, reliable, high-quality varieties.
Cultivating regular seeds requires a little extra care. Male plants need to be identified and removed prior to flowering in order to prevent pollination and the production of new seeds. This process can take time and expertise, but is a critical part of cultivating a successful harvest.
This additional effort also means that a pack of regular seeds will produce half as many males as feminized ones. While we recommend starting with feminized seeds for beginner growers, experienced gardeners can enjoy the benefits of working with regular seed. This includes the ability to select and breed specific, precise phenotypes for their next crop.
Cloning
The biggest benefit to growing from seeds is that it allows you to select a strain with the morphology, flavour profile or potency you like. Cloning, on the other hand, gives you an exact genetic duplicate of a chosen mother plant.
Clones can make your grow much simpler, because they all like the same type of light, nutrients and soil pH. However, you have to choose the right mother plant, and it can be tricky to get a good number of clones that root.
Clones can also be more unstable, as they can sometimes become hermaphrodites. In addition, you have to take care of them carefully, because they are more susceptible to nutrient burn and pests than seedlings. A proper rooting environment and a little bit of cloning hormone will help you avoid these problems. The bottom line is that cloning takes time, and there can be a steep learning curve to the process. This is why some growers opt to stick with seeds, especially if they are new to cannabis cultivation.
Genetic Stability
Genetic stability is important for the continued presence of desirable traits in strains over generations. It allows breeders to select the best mother and father and produce stable hybrid offspring that exhibit those traits. It also prevents unwanted mutations that may interfere with the quality and performance of a plant.
When choosing regular seed, be sure to choose from reputable breeders who maintain high breeding standards. They should also test their seeds for hermaphroditic plants, which contain both male and female reproductive organs. Hermaphroditic plants can cause a loss of quality in cannabis crops, and should be removed before harvesting.
The present investigation discussed the genetic stability on seven promising rice entries under 12 different environments through estimating agro-morphological traits. The result showed that all studied entries had a high genetic stability and exhibited two trends from one experiment to another. The mean squares related to environments and genotype X environment revealed that all estimated traits have considerable interaction with the environmental factors.
Variation
The genetics of a seed plant are stored in specific parts of the plants called chromosomes. For safety nature gives each seed plant a back up copy of its genes one from mum and another from dad. During reproduction this can cause hermaphroditic plants that produce male and female flowers. This can lead to unwanted pollination and a decrease in flower quality, so it is important to separate male and female plants through careful sexing.
Previous studies identifying genetic factors that affect seed traits have predominantly used mutant screens and have focused on individual genes rather than analyzing the effects of multiple genes at once. This makes it difficult to determine whether genetic factors that influence both seed size and number exhibit a trade-off in nature. Two QTL mapping experiments that simultaneously analyzed seed weight and seed number found that the effects of these genetic factors on the traits are pleiotropic. This suggests that within-plant variation in seed size may be driven by multiple genetic and nongenetic factors and may reflect diversifying bet-hedging strategies triggered by environmental unpredictability.
