Cultivators make the decision to plant regular or feminized seed based on cultivation experience, where they live and the purposes of their harvest. For those who want to keep mother plants for taking cuttings/clones, regular seeds are the best choice.
Feminized seeds produce a higher percentage of female plants, but growers often lose out on unique phenotypes in the process.
Stable Genetics
A plant’s genetics are its DNA—the hereditary materials that determine how it will grow and what phenotypes it may display. When growing cannabis, stable seeds are essential for producing consistent crops that contain high-quality cannabinoids and mature into healthy plants.
Stabilising a strain typically requires generations of crossing and back-crossing siblings to select desirable traits for breeding. This process aims to create hybrid offspring that produce predictable Mendelian ratios of desirable traits, while eliminating any unwanted ones.
With feminized seeds, you don’t have to worry about male plants, but this is just one of the reasons why they can be more unstable than their regular counterparts. Because they undergo a significant amount of genetic modification, it’s more likely that a feminized seed will not grow properly, and that it will have difficulty reproducing itself after the fact. Regular seeds, on the other hand, are more reliable, and they make for healthier plants that are easy to breed.
Stable Phenotypes
Genetically, cannabis varieties differ very little between specimens, displaying a highly uniform growth and flowering pattern. However, these differences are due to the presence of alleles – variant forms of a gene that code for specific traits – in each parent plant. Just like the children of a couple have different eye colours despite having the same parents, different alleles can manifest themselves in distinct phenotypes.
Breeders take their time to find strains that display the specific properties they’re after, ensuring that these characteristics will resurface in future generations. Then they take cuttings from these plants and cross them with a stable male, replicating the desired phenotype in each offspring plant.
The selection of genotypes based on mean performance and stability selected simultaneously across multi-environment trials, is called MTSI (multi-trait Stability Index). A low MTSI indicates that the genotype is closer to its ideotype and that it will perform consistently under diverse environmental conditions. MTSI was used to identify 135 soybean genotypes with high stability for seven seed composition traits, including protein content and five fatty acid contents: palmitic, stearic, oleic, and linolenic acids.
Easier to Breed
Regular seed is a better choice for growers who want to experiment with breeding. Male plants produce pollen that can be used to fertilize female plants, creating new strains of marijuana. This allows for the preservation of old-school genetics that would otherwise be lost in feminized seeds.
The process of growing regular weed isn’t much different from the cultivation of other varieties. It’s easy to get started, and the germination rates are consistent with photoperiod, feminized or autoflowering seeds. It also provides more flexibility for cultivators looking to create their own marijuana strains, allowing them to find specimens that produce terpenes and highs they enjoy. SSSC offers a variety of top-tier cultivars in regular seed format, including Chemdawg, Frosty Friday, Creamy Kees and Prima Holandica. Explore the full collection and choose the best one for you!
More Vigorous Plants
There are a few key reasons growers choose regular seeds. One of the main ones is that they can easily eliminate male plants and spend more time focusing on making flowers than seeds, especially early into flowering. This is because pollinated buds produce minimal cannabinoids and harsh smoke.
Another reason is that many old-school cultivars never made the transition to feminized seeds, and some of these are pure gold in their own right. Grapefruit regular, for example, tastes just like its name, with biting citrus notes underpinning the sweetness and a refreshing aroma that cleanses the mind and energizes the body.
Finally, growers who prefer to create their own hybrids also find that regular seed offers more options for crossing. As mentioned, if you select a female plant and a male plant from the same batch of regular seed, they will naturally become hermaphrodites and give you an equal percentage of male and female plants.
