Many growers choose to cultivate regular seed because of their genetic stability and breeding potential. They also require sexing to remove male plants and guarantee female flowers.
From a cultivation standpoint, regular seeds are more resilient than feminized seeds and can deal with stress better. They also have a lower production cost and are cheaper than feminized.
Stable Genetics
Regular seeds offer more genetic stability than feminized or autoflowering varieties. This stability is especially important for breeders, who use it to ensure that desirable traits are passed down in future generations of cannabis strains.
Feminized plants are less stable, as they can become hermaphrodites if they’re stressed through techniques like topping, fimming, lollypopping, and defoliation. This can waste time and resources as growers are forced to remove all the males from their crop.
With regular seed, it’s much more likely that every plant in a pack will be female. This means that growers can enjoy a weed garden that’s free of hermies and a more efficient growing process overall. That being said, many growers find that hermies add a certain amount of variety to their tent and can be an enjoyable challenge for them to take on. These plants can also be used as mothers and clones for other grows. This helps to save on time and money as well as providing a high-quality harvest.
Stable Yields
When cultivated correctly, regular seed can produce robust and high-quality cannabis plants. They provide genetic stability, breeding potential, and the opportunity for phenotype variation, making them an ideal choice for growers seeking a unique cultivar or strain.
When grown in the right conditions, a regular seed plant has a 50% chance of emerging as either a male or female plant. This requires a grower to perform the task of sexing each plant and removing any hermaphrodite specimens promptly. This process can be time consuming, but it is crucial for preventing unwanted pollination and preserving the integrity of the flower buds.
Unlike feminized seeds, which are treated using chemicals or colloidal silver to prevent hermaphroditism, regular seeds operate exactly how nature intended. This allows breeders to create new cultivars and superior clones. The sexing process also provides a more organic experience, which is ideal for those looking to maintain a natural and organic cultivation experience. For this reason, some growers prefer regular seed over feminized seeds.
Stable Price
Despite the popularity of feminized seeds, many growers still prefer regular seeds for cultivation. The reason is simple: they are cheaper to produce than their feminized counterparts. This makes them much more affordable for beginner growers, especially if they buy them from a supplier that provides a high-quality genetics.
The main benefit of growing regular seeds is that they allow growers to create their own hybrids by crossing different strains. This is possible because regular seeds have a 50% chance of producing both male and female plants. Male cannabis plants produce pollen, which can be used to fertilize female cannabis plants and produce new seeds.
For this reason, it is essential for cannabis breeders to use regular seeds for their breeding projects. While anyone with a basic understanding of plant biology can cultivate regular seeds, experienced breeders will appreciate the stability and reliability of these classic varieties. They are the backbone of the cannabis industry.
Stable Environment
The seed pool acts as an evolutionary filter, reducing the fitness uncertainty generated by cyclical or random environmental conditions. Seed pools allow a plant population to avoid responding genetically to environmental conditions that occur only rarely and thus increase the relative frequency of genotypes with high fitness across generations.
Seeds can also be more stable than leaves in their response to environmental change, consistent with the ‘stable leaf nutrient hypothesis’ and indicative of a conservative reproductive strategy that ensures long-term plant demographic stability. In addition, seed nutrient concentrations are less responsive than in leaves, suggesting that seeds may be more adaptable to multidimensional resource changes than leaves, thereby providing a potentially important evolutionary buffer against environmental variation.
Seed longevity is a function of both the initial viability of seeds (Ki) and their distribution over time, s. Our analysis of WOSR cultivars suggests that variations in Ki are driven by the parental growth environment, while differences in s are largely controlled by the genetic background of individual seeds.
