I have long been a proponent of growing marijuana from bag seeds for a couple of good reasons but, as times change, so does the evolution of seeds which recently made me re-evaluate my bag seed position.
First of all using bag seed saves you a lot of money because you don’t have to buy seeds. Seed prices are basically $10 per seed. All the sellers have deals etc., but for the most part 10 bucks is the going price.
Since you are using bag seed, the weed you found it in was probably really good or you wouldn’t have bothered to save the seeds. This is great because you won’t have to play the, will it be good, guessing game.
Since you have the seeds you won’t have to wait for delivery which can be fairly long because many of the seed guys are out of the country.
The seed guys use the mail service for deliveries so you won’t have to worry about the United States Postal Service intercepting your order of seeds.
Since these are all good reasons to use bag seed what made me change my mind?
I started a bag seed grow journal in November of 2021 using seeds from good weed purchased from Colorado retail marijuana stores over the past couple of years and the results are telling.
Most seeds I used all started to flower after about 4 weeks under 24/7 light. I have tested the quality of the early flowering weed several times and I’m not impressed.
For plants that have been growing/flowering 4 months, the quality of weed is poor and the buds are tiny compared to other grows I’ve had using regular seed.
I had a few seeds that didn’t flower under 24 hour light which suggested they were regular seeds. I took 15 clones from those plants and guess what; all of them are flowering under 24 hours of light.
To summarize; the bag seed plants started flowering after a few weeks which means the seeds were from plants grown with auto flower or feminized seeds. I came to this conclusion because the seeds were from different strains purchased at different times.
This has never happened to me in the 40+ years of growing weed from bag seed. I can only surmise that the retail stores in Colorado are selling marijuana grown from either auto flower or feminized seeds, which is really surprising to me.
Surprising; because you don’t get the yield from modified seeds as you do from regular seeds. Surprising; absolutely, because you don’t get the full impact of the THC from modified seeds, no matter the percentage claimed by the label, as you would from regular seeds.
I have grown auto flowers and feminized seeds several times and IMO,  they are a pain to grow, they are more sensitive than your sister-in-law, you can’t clone them and the weed isn’t as good as weed grown from regular seeds.
In conclusion; I strongly recommend home growers only use regular seeds and to sacrifice one or two females by pollinating them and using them to grow your own seeds. I don’t believe in using modified seeds and after several years experience with them I’ll never use them again.
One day in the future regular seeds may only be available to breeders so now is the time to stock up.
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