Unlike feminized seeds that produce only female plants, regular cannabis seeds have a 50/50 chance of producing male and female plants. Consequently, growers will need to eliminate male plants or breed them with female plants.
Breeding allows growers to select the best plants for morphology and colour, or to create new strains with exceptional potency, flavour profiles or colours. Without regular seed, growers cannot do this.
Stable Genetics
Stable strains offer growers consistency in terms of the final product. To stabilize a strain, breeders must undergo a process of backcrossing over generations, selecting and fixing specific traits that are desirable for their particular strain. This takes a lot of time, effort and patience, but it is a critical process that can provide consistent cannabis.
To stabilise a strain, breeders select a stable mother and father and then cross them to produce hybrid offspring. Depending on the stability of the parent, Mendelian inheritance dictates that offspring will express three phenotypes: 50% will resemble the mother, 25% will resemble the father and 10% will be a combination of both.
To ensure that only desirable phenotypes are expressed, breeders will backcross these F1 hybrids, producing S1, S2, S3 and so on. This helps prevent inbreeding depression, which can happen more quickly when you are crossing plants with very similar genetics. This is why stable seeds are highly valued by breeders.
Cheaper to Buy
When it comes to choosing a seed variety, many cultivators are confronted with options like autoflower, feminized, and photoperiod (regular). While each offers advantages to specific cultivation situations, regular seeds offer some great benefits for growers on a budget.
While the number of male plants in a normal pack may vary, you can expect a higher percentage of females with each plant grown from regular seed. This means you won’t have to spend time and space culling males, making them ideal for small-scale indoor operations or growers capped by legal plant counts.
The price of a regular pack is also much cheaper than the prices of feminized or autoflower options, giving growers an excellent return on investment for their purchase. You can also find deals on multiple packs of regular seeds on Seedsman, including popular strains like Larry Lemon and Fuel D.OG.
More Resistant
As you peruse the seed catalogs, look for varieties with resistance to diseases that have plagued your vegetable garden in the past. It is important to remember that resistant varieties are not immune to disease, and that tasks such as crop rotation, weeding and judicious use of sprays will still be needed to protect your plants and avoid productivity loss.
Plant breeders use disease-resistant varieties for several reasons. The most important is the fact that these varieties produce higher yields than susceptible varieties, even with the same management practices.
The European seed companies have established a network, MATREF, to harmonize reference material (controls, differential hosts and pathogens) used for testing resistance in variety registration trials of vegetable crops such as brassicas/root vegetables, cucurbits, large-seeded and leafy vegetables and solanaceae. Naktuinbouw has contributed to the collection with disease isolates for use in testing resistance against fungi, viruses and bacteria. The MATREF reference collection is available in GRIN and can be ordered by plant pathologists.
Easier to Breed
Whether it’s extreme potency, a specific flavour profile or a unique morphology that appeals to you, breeding is the key. Regular seed is ideal for those interested in cannabis breeding, as it allows you to select male plants that display exceptional traits and collect their pollen for cloning.
This is the same process that feminised seeds undergo, but with the added benefit that you don’t need to use synthetic chemicals or colloidal silver to create female plants. Many growers that breed choose to work with regular seeds as it makes the process a lot easier and avoids wasting growing space, nutrients and light on male plants.
Tropic Thunder regular: Sit back and relax with this mellow indica that offers fruity tones reminiscent of a cocktail at sunset. It’s a strain more suitable for veteran cultivators as it grows tall and requires experienced training. Flowering lasts for around ten weeks, delivering a harvest of up to 35 oz in October.
