Regular seeds are used to create marijuana plants that carry the best characteristics of their male and female parents. This gives you the option to clone your favourite cultivars, whether it’s for their potency, flavour profiles or colours.
Growing regular seeds can be more difficult than feminized seeds, but it can also be very rewarding. Let’s have a look at why this is.
Genetic Stability
Regular seeds can be difficult to cultivate because they produce both male and female plants, which require sexing to remove the males. This process requires time, effort, and expertise. However, it is the best option for breeders looking to create a strain with stable genetics.
This genetic stability is necessary to ensure the integrity of the genetic traits that have been introduced into a plant. Regulatory bodies require this proof before giving a product the go-ahead for commercial use. Typically, breeders will stabilise a strain over multiple generations of breeding. In order to do this, they start with a parent plant that has stable genetics and cross it with another parent. The offspring will then have varying genetic stability depending on the parental genetics. This is where the difference between feminized and regular seeds comes in, as the offspring of feminized seeds can have unpredictable results. RAPD analysis showed that epigenetic changes (both de novo methylation and unmethylation) increased over time in stored and storage-imbibed seeds. This was influenced neither by the length of storage or storage atmosphere.
Breeding Potential
Regular seeds give you the chance to grow a mix of male and female plants. This can be a good thing for gardeners who enjoy breeding, since male cannabis plants produce pollen that can fertilize females. This is how breeders create new strains or phenotypes of existing ones.
However, this requires a certain level of cultivation experience to be successful. You must know how to identify and remove male plants from your garden before they can pollinate your entire crop. This is a process called “gender profiling.” It can be time-consuming, especially if you have to wait until your plants are in the pre-flowering stage.
Feminized seeds eliminate the need for gender profiling by guaranteeing a high percentage of female plants. This makes them popular with many growers, as they can avoid the hassle of identifying and removing male plants from their gardens. As a result, they can spend more of their energy on producing buds instead.
Flowering Time
The flowering time of regular seeds can be a little unpredictable. This is because plants are susceptible to the environment and prone to genotype-by-environment (GxE) interactions. These interactions are responsible for some of the phenotypic variance observed in flowering traits.
For example, some cultivars have a hard time transitioning from vegetation to flowering and require a light shift. While others are genetically predisposed to transitioning into flowering regardless of light hours.
Once your plant reaches the flowering stage it will need less nitrogen and more of the other macronutrients like phosphorus and potassium. Adding these will allow her to produce a larger yield.
You may also want to consider flushing your plants once they reach the flowering stage. This is a technique that many growers swear by. It involves cutting out the nutrients to prepare your plants for harvest. The resulting buds are said to be smoother and more flavorful. Moreover, it is also considered to be beneficial for your plants’ health.
Yield
A lot of growers prefer regular seeds because they can use them for making their own seed stock. This is because the male plants can be removed and pollen collected from the females so that they may then be crossed with each other to make new seeds. It is a very time consuming process but it is a very important one for those who enjoy growing their own mother plants. It is also a very effective way of increasing the overall yield for a harvest because all the water and nutrients can be focused on the females.
The good news is that if you buy a pack of 10 regular seeds then you will typically get around 50% male and female plants from it. This is not as much of a problem as it sounds because you can simply remove the males when they are in their pre-flowering phase. It can be a very rewarding process as you can then start to produce your own unique cultivars and phenotypes.