High Quality Cannabis Seeds
To see an entire plant growing out a small and seemingly insignificant seed remains a miracle of life and a beautiful sight to behold!
If stored under the right conditions (cool, dark and dry), cannabis seeds can be kept for at least 5 years or even longer. However, over time the overall germination rate drops gradually.
Follow some simple basics of growing and it will be achievable for everyone and relatively easy to get a good result! Even for beginners who find it a challenge to grow (so-called) difficult strains; it’s not all that difficult. But if you mess around with it, growing even the most easy-growing strains can turn out to be a disappointment. Therefore, pay close attention to the essentials that every plant needs time and again. In practice, it also comes down to feeling and experience. As you will notice, you learn from each new grow and you develop a greater feeling for correctly estimating what the plant does or does not need at any given moment.
Cannabis Sativa L.
The cannabis plant (Cannabis Sativa L.) is an annual, unisexual (dioecious) plant, which means that there are only plants that are either male or female. An exception would be hermaphrodites (hermies) which can appear in overly stressed plants.
After flowering, the plant dies. At the end of the day the average grower only cares about the female flowers that are harvested at the end of the flowering period, then dried, cured and smoked, evaporated (= ‘vape’), or that are further processed into other products such as an oil (RSO) or perhaps a butter to make cakes and pies.
The male inflorescences (not flowers but balls) are needed for seed production and breeding of offspring. The male plant dies quickly after it has released its pollen.
What kind of seeds would one choose?
When it comes to THC (Delta9 TetraHydroCannabiol) the plant’s most popular and celebrated psycho-active cannabinoid, there are 3 types of Cannabis seeds to consider.
Regular Cannabis seeds
This is the situation as it occurs in wild life nature: after fertilization by the male pollen of another plant, the female plants produce the seeds. These seeds can grow in to male plants as well as in to female plants. Unfortunately you never know in advance how many will turn out to be male and how many will develop in to the desirable female plants. The average ratio favours the female over male plants slightly.
If you grow regular seeds, you can distinguish the males from the females in the early phase of flowering by determining this on the basis of the type of flowering that is characteristic of the sex. The male flowering type show themselves as ‘balls’, the female ones do not, they slowly develop into beautiful flowers.
When you have identified the males in the early flowering phase, weed them out if necessary to prevent the male pollen from fertilizing the females. After all you don’t want your (female) buds to be full of seeds!
If you use regular seeds for your growth, keep in mind that you will need a larger surface area because you will then be raising both female and male plants in the vegetative (= grow) phase.
Many growers prefer to grow with regular seed because the genetics are generally much more stable and definitely much better suited for producing clones. Another reason is that regular seeds are produced more sustainably in comparison to feminized seeds.
Feminized (Female) Cannabis Seeds
Since the average grower and cannabis smoker is really only interested in the female buds, breeders in the past have not been idle and found a method to produce seed that only produces female plants! And so the so-called FEMINIZED Cannabis seeds came on the market! A huge improvement for anyone who wants to grow without much fuss.
The disadvantage of ‘feminized’ seed lies in the fact that a natural process is chemically manipulated, which ultimately affects or can affect the stability and ‘fitness’ of the individual plant. But the advantages are countless: much less space is required, you do not have to make a selection between males and females and all plants produce female flowers (buds).
Bottom Line: Feminized Cannabis seeds are the best choice for the novice grower.
Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds
Mostly available in feminized form (autofem) but some brands do also autoregular seeds. The name says it all, these seeds will flower automatically after a short growing period and regardless of the amount of light. The flowering process starts automatically based on a time cycle instead of a light cycle. Autoflowering seeds are the result of cleverly mixing different types of genetics and saw the light of day around 2007.
It was a breeder in America called the Joint Doctor who succeeded in crossing that autoflowering superpower trait. And so there was Lowryder1. But Lowryder1 didn’t get higher than 40 cm at most.
Now, 15 years later and many breedings further, the quality of (most) autoflowering seeds is at a level that can compete with that of the non-autoflowering seeds.
Non-autoflowering cannabis plants that are grown outdoors only start flowering when the light and dark periods are more or less equal. That is why plants that grow around the equator (day and night periods are almost always the same) usually start flowering almost immediately and practically completely skip the growth or vegatitive phase. In more northern or (southern hemisphere) regions such as North-West Europe, the daily day-night, light-dark distribution is about the same when it is already towards the beginning of September. Please note: then the flowering starts and then they still have about 2 months to go! The conditions at that time (autumn) are usually a lot less favorable for outdoor growth..less light, colder and more humid, with a chance of rot and mold in your precious buds and a high chance of a less than maximum result.
The big advantage of using autoflowering seeds for outdoor growing is time saving! It takes 3-4 months at most from seed to harvest. This gives you the opportunity to grow even 2 times in a row in a season and thus harvest 2x! (Or sometimes even 3x!) How cool is that!
In addition to the fact that they can generally withstand cold and moisture, another additional advantage is that autoflowering plants usually do not grow higher than about 1.20 meters max. This is useful if the plants do not have too much space or when you do not want them to be too much in public view.
Hemp seeds
This also concerns seeds of a subspecies of the Cannabis Sativa plant, but the big difference here is that they can be grown completely legally because the THC content of these plants does not exceed the maximum allowable content of 0.2% for the Netherlands and 0.6% for all other EU counties, whereas some high potency thc strains can have up to 28% or even higher thc content. You can smoke yourself completely drowsy, but it won’t get you ‘high’ even a bit. These plants are grown for commercial products such as fiber (clothing, rope), tea (flower tops), power foods (seeds), dietary supplements (CBD) and other applications.