Regular sexed seeds allow growers to work with plants that express an equal balance of male and female chromosomes. This allows them to perform pheno hunting to find the perfect plants for a breeding project.
Choose this option if you enjoy the challenge of finding keeper female plants or prefer to use your growing space efficiently by discarding males. This is also the best choice if you want to breed your own strains.
Stable Genetics
The wide world of cannabis genetics can be overwhelming, but when it comes to feminized seeds vs regular seed it all boils down to stability. As the name suggests, regular seeds operate just how nature intended and have a 50% chance of germinating as either a male or female plant. This makes them perfect for breeders to create new cultivars and produce superior clones.
The best way to get stable genetics is to choose a strong mother and father plant with the specific traits you’re looking for. These are then crossed to create a F1 generation of offspring plants. After this a series of backcrosses are carried out to stabilise the desired traits. The end result is a genetically stable strain that yields the same results every grow. This is a huge advantage for breeders, especially those who specialise in high-quality medical marijuana strains. They want to be able to guarantee their customers a consistent harvest and that their sought-after properties will continue to resurface.
Easy to Breed
Unlike feminized seeds which only produce female plants, regular seeds grow both male and female cannabis plants. This makes them the perfect choice for growers who want to create their own custom genetic crosses.
Creating new cultivars is easy with regular seed because you can identify which plants are male and female based on their appearance. This is important because it can save time and energy, especially for beginner growers who are often under pressure to maximize harvests.
With regular seed, you can breed indica and sativa strains together to create balanced cultivars that express the best of both worlds. You can also experiment with terpene profiles and see what combinations you can come up with. For example, you can cross a fruity indica with an earthy sativa to create a unique cultivar with balanced potency. It’s a great way to try out different flavours and aromas.
Stable Yields
Because regular seeds develop into either male or female plants, growers get two harvests from a single pack. This is a major advantage over feminized seed, which can give you only one harvest per plant.
Identifying and isolating male plants early into flowering can help you maximize your yield. This prevents the fertilized buds from producing minimal cannabinoids and harsh smoke.
As a result, cultivating regular strains gives you a more consistent outcome in your buds. This can be a boon for growers looking for high-yielding varieties.
For example, if you choose a sativa-dominant strain like Granddaddy Purple regular, with 22% THC, you’ll be rewarded with massive main colas and ripe berry flavor. This strain is a good choice for intermediate growers as it takes about 10 weeks to reach maturity and harvests in October. It also has a natural resistance to mold and can be grown outdoors, despite its sativa heritage. You’ll want to make sure your grow area is sturdy enough to handle the hefty colas.
Cheaper
A grower can get more female plants out of a pack of regular seeds than with feminized seed. This means that you can grow a larger harvest of smokable buds without spending as much money.
However, you still need to spend money on nutrients and medium. With feminized seeds, you don’t need to worry about hermaphrodites (male flowers) because the odds of every seed becoming a male are so much lower than with regular seed.
This is a big deal to a genetic purist because each hermaphrodite plant can produce a different phenotype with its own traits, including growth pattern, leaf and stem development, scent, yield, insect resistance, THC/CBD ratio, and other characteristics. Growers can take clones of these hermaphrodite plants to preserve the desirable features in their next crop. This is a major benefit of working with feminized seeds. But, if you want to breed a new strain or improve on an existing one, working with regular seeds is the best way to do so.