Author: Weed Smoker

Regular seeds are the best choice for growers interested in breeding their own strains. Growing regular seeds requires sexing plants to identify and remove males, which takes time and expertise.

Regular seeds are popular among breeders creating new strains, as they offer more genetic variation than feminized seeds. Here are some things to consider before choosing regular seeds for your next grow:.

Stable Genetics

Creating stable seeds involves years of rigorous breeding, patience and a lot of money. During this time, cultivators will grow many generations of plants and select for those that display desirable traits. Once stable seeds are achieved, growers can expect their resulting phenotypes to exhibit predictable results.

Stable genetics are what make regular cannabis seeds the most desirable option for growers. During the seed-making process, breeders combine stable male and female parent plants. The next generation of offspring is then selected for desired traits and back-crossed with the parental lines. After several generations, the strain begins to stabilise and desirable traits begin to dominate. This process is what allows growers to take cuttings/clones from a single plant that will produce robust descendants. This is also the same reason that cloning is much easier with regular varieties than feminized seeds. This is why reputable seed companies with a focus on stability and potency will offer both feminized and regular cannabis seeds.

Breeding

While it can be fun to try your hand at breeding cannabis plants, it can also be time-consuming and risky. Regular seeds can produce male plants, and you must monitor the sex of your plants through the growing stage and before they begin to flower to remove any males.

Feminized seeds eliminate the guesswork of identifying and removing male plants, which is why they’re ideal for commercial growers who want to guarantee a specific ratio of female to male plants in their harvest.

With feminized seeds, you can count on every single plant being a female and not producing pollen. In this way, you’ll get twice the yield from your crop and save valuable time and money on maintenance. Nevertheless, many experienced growers prefer to work with regular seeds in order to create their own strains. These plants provide greater genetic variation than feminized ones and offer the chance to discover unique new characteristics through selective breeding.

Phenotype Variation

The phenotype of an organism is the physical expression of its genes. A plant’s height, for example, is a phenotype that can vary between plants with identical genetic makeup. The phenotype can be affected by environmental factors. For this reason, growers use phenotyping to select the strain with the best yields, potency, flavor, and bud density. They also use phenotyping to identify the best cultivars and to create clones of them for mass production.

The ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) mutagenesis of soybeans has resulted in a wide variety of seed composition phenotypes. Various phenotypes have been found for carbohydrate, protein, and oil content. EMS phenotypes also differ in fatty acid profile. Correlation analyses show that the phenotypes for seed carbohydrate and fatty acid traits have little correlation with each other. However, there is a significant correlation between sucrose and raffinose, and a moderate relationship between stachyose and protein content. In addition, serotiny in soybeans appears to be a result of conflicting selection pressures from fire and seed predation.

Cost

In general, regular seeds are cheaper than feminized varieties. This is because feminized seeds are more expensive to produce due to the process involved in creating feminized plants.

Growing regular seeds requires sexing and removal of male plants to prevent hermaphroditism, so they require more attention and care than feminized strains. This can be challenging for beginners and novice growers, but with time and experience it becomes easier to identify male plants and cull them promptly.

If you are interested in exploring the full range of genetic traits and phenotypes, regular seeds may be the best choice for you. With reputable seed banks offering an expansive selection of classic and modern breeds, there is something to suit every grower’s preferences and goals. Cloning is also possible with regular seeds, which makes it easy to duplicate the morphology and flavour profile of your favourite specimens. This is especially helpful for breeders seeking to develop their own strains with unique qualities, such as specific colour or high THC levels.

Regular cannabis seeds operate exactly as nature intended, offering a natural breeding experience for growers. They are a key part of cultivating cannabis, especially for those who like to make their own seed stock or take clones.

However, growing regular seed requires sexing to ensure the production of only female plants. Consequently, they require more attention and care than feminized seeds.

Stable Genetics

Regular cannabis seeds are produced by crossing a female plant with a male plant. The resulting seeds can contain either a male X or a female Y, giving rise to plants of the opposite sex that display different traits depending on their environment. These differences in phenotype are what make regular seed an exciting choice for breeders and growers.

The creation of stable cultivars is a lengthy process that requires time and large growing space. It begins with a chosen mother plant that possesses certain desired characteristics, such as flowering time and psychoactive properties. This mother plant is then crossed with a genetically stable male that shares these desired traits. The resulting offspring, also known as the F1 generation, typically exhibit a high degree of heterozygosis and will therefore display a wide range of growth and flowering patterns.

Stabilizing the genetics of a strain involves selective breeding over many generations to produce offspring that express less variation in the genes that determine how a plant behaves. This creates a cultivar with more uniform traits, which then produces seeds with the same qualities for subsequent grows.

Breeding

Regular seeds are great for experienced growers looking to create their own strains or experiment with breeding. They give a theoretical ratio of male plants to female plants (with some luck and environmental conditions), but they are often cheaper than feminized seeds. When you grow regular seed, it is important to cull any male plants before they pollinate your desired female plant. Otherwise, all your water and nutrients could be going to waste!

Feminized seeds don’t produce any male plants, and that makes them ideal for commercial growers with a set number of desired phenotypes in each crop. However, they also come with the disadvantage that some growers find it difficult to identify and remove hermaphroditic plants.

Growing regular seeds requires a little more work than feminized seed. With a bit of practice, you can breed a strain that produces the high and flavor you’re looking for! You can also cross different strains to explore opposing terpene profiles and create unique cultivars.

Cloning

A clone is simply a rootless branch cut from a mother plant. Clones can be very useful to growers who know exactly which phenotype they want to cultivate. However, clones require more energy to develop roots than plants grown from seeds. The rooting hormone required for clones is expensive and can be difficult to obtain.

Clones may also carry flaws in their DNA inherited from their mothers. These can manifest themselves months later during flowering and result in a loss of consistency, flavour and potency. Seed producers do a great job of improving the consistency of their products but seeds still produce some variation in colour, flavour and characteristics.

For anyone interested in developing new strains through natural plant reproduction, clones are not the way to go. To create seeds, a male and female plant must be crossed. To do this, a grower must take a cutting from a hermaphroditic plant which requires extensive maintenance and monitoring to prevent unwanted pollination.

Genetic Diversity

Seeds from regular plants contain both male and female genetics, meaning that they require sexing to identify and remove the males. This process is time-consuming and requires knowledge, expertise, and resources. However, it is the only way to guarantee that your crops will produce only female plants.

Although the mating system is a major factor influencing the extent to which seed collections reflect standing populations’ genetic diversity, the exact effect of different sampling strategies on seed genetics is unclear. In particular, few empirical tests have been performed to determine how different collection methods influence the number and distribution of rare alleles (Funda et al., 2009).

The observed and expected heterozygosity and effective allele numbers of seed mothers were compared between H. sericea and H. teretifolia using COLONY genotyping (Peakall and Smouse 2012). The results showed that the estimates of Ho, He, and FIS fall within the range of population genomics analyses conducted with larger sample sizes in natural stands. The results also indicated that the amount of parental clones used influences the genetic diversity of a seed orchard. A high number of parent clones promotes genetic diversity by increasing allele numbers and decreasing selfing rates.

Many growers ask why Sensi Seeds carries regular seed in addition to feminized. The answer is simple: breeding!

Regular seeds offer breeders more genetic stability, which is beneficial for creating new strains. They also provide the possibility of phenotype variation, meaning each plant may have slightly different traits including growth pattern, leaf and stem development, scent, yield, insect resistance, terpene profile and THC/CBD ratio.

Stable Genetics

In order to stabilise a strain, breeders need to cross together plants with desired traits over several generations. This process of inbreeding will help to ensure that the desired characteristics are dominant and more easily expressed, while unwanted characteristics become gradually recessive and eventually disappear from the strain’s gene pool.

A stable genetic line can be created using F1 hybrids if the parents have desirable qualities, however, this requires a lot of time and effort to achieve robust stability. A more efficient way to stabilise a strain is through back-crossing, which can reduce the number of generations needed to stabilise a specific trait.

As the cannabis industry takes a cue from agriculture, we expect to see more specialised seed companies that offer stable genetics and plant trait development. This could free up growers to focus on what they do best and create high-demand cultivars. The emergence of these specialist agtech companies could also make stabilised seed a viable revenue stream for the industry.

Less Expensive

Due to the natural process of producing seeds, regular seed is a cheaper option than other types. Compared to feminized seed, which is produced by spraying female plants with an unpleasant-sounding chemical that triggers them to produce male pollen sacs, regular seed is a more organic and sustainable way of producing cannabis.

Regular seeds also offer a more varied genetic strain than feminized seed, as they preserve the genetic stability of the parent plants and allow for phenotype variation in offspring. This variation offers growers and breeders the opportunity to experiment with different strains and create new hybrids that may offer unique flavors, aromas, and effects.

However, growing regular seed is not without its challenges. Unlike feminized seed, which produces only female plants, regular seed has a chance of producing hermaphroditic plants (females with both male and female reproductive organs). This requires careful monitoring and removal to ensure that only the desired plant is harvested for flower production.

Easy To Breed

Regular seeds preserve the genetic stability of their parent strains, making them ideal for breeding cannabis. This allows breeders to create a variety of phenotypes that produce unique flavors, aromas, effects, and appearances. It also allows growers to make their own strains by crossing different varieties to produce new hybrids.

While feminized seeds are great for those who only want female plants, there are advantages to using regular seed as well. First, it is easy to find a wide range of strains. Second, regular seeds are less expensive than feminized seeds.

However, growing regular seeds requires more care and attention from a grower than feminized seeds. This is because regular seed has a chance of producing hermaphrodite plants that contain both male and female reproductive organs. This means that a grower must carefully monitor their crop and remove hermaphrodite plants before they flower. This can lead to unwanted pollination and decreased quality in the final harvest.

Create Your Own Strains

Just like you and your siblings might have different physical attributes from your parents, each seed created through cross-pollination will also express a unique combination of characteristics from the parent strains. For many growers and breeders, this diversity is a welcome addition to the harvest.

However, the majority of growers prefer a stable strain with predictable effects and an excellent terpene profile. The best way to achieve this is by selecting a few specimens and backcrossing them with each other until they create offspring that embody your desired qualities.

While it isn’t everyone’s ambition to become a cannabis breeder, creating your own regular strain can be a fun and rewarding experience. Just be sure to select the best specimens from the crop and treat them well in order to ensure a successful breeding process. The results will be well worth the effort. If you are able to create a cannabis strain that you can be proud of, then it will make the long wait for your next harvest all the more worthwhile.