A Guide To Buying Cannabis Seeds

If you are buying cannabis seeds for the first time, or are a seasoned grower, here are some top tips and advice on how to pick the right seeds for you. 

Follow this guide to ensure you aren’t being exploited by tricky marketing tactics selling cheap and inconsistent seeds or even straight hemp! 

Think About Your Needs, Space & Time

With so much choice in the cannabis seed market, it can feel overwhelming when buying cannabis seeds.

Cannabis seeds will grow into different shapes and sizes depending on a number of factors: genetics first, followed by your grow space, pot size and grow method at your disposal. 

If you are restricted with your height, chances are you will either have to grow a shorter indica variety or use training techniques for sativa seeds. If you need to do it in a shorter time, you’ll also find indica seeds more useful as they take 8-10 weeks, compared to 10-16 weeks. Sativa strains generally give the consumer a more uplifting experience and are considered more cerebral and better for day time usage. Indicas are more sedative so tend to work better for relaxing and evening use. Most breeders indicate the percentage of indica and sativa in a strain, as most strains are now poly hybrids with a number of different sativa and indica grandparents in the mix. 

Breeder Reputation

Is there much information about the seed producer online? Do they have social media? How long have they been active? Do they have a website that promotes buying cannabis seeds? Is there much information about their purpose, history or passion available? If they are making claims in their marketing about winning cups, can you find any details of that online? If they are making claims about how great the seeds are but there’s no one speaking about them online or providing any feedback, chances are its BS.

There are numerous bulk seed producers out there, and many take the loving care and attention you would expect and hope for, but others have seen how popular and profitable seeds can be when you don’t have any real work or overheads to produce them. Use a longstanding trusted seedbank who have good relationships with the breeders they are reselling. No upstanding seedbank will be pushing out genetics with a dodgy reputation because they wouldn’t want this to tarnish their own. 

Pictures of the Seed Grown to Maturity

If a strain has a great name and tells you how great it is, but there are no pictures – is it even real? Everyone has a camera. We need to see what we are buying. Not every plant comes out looking like it deserves to be on the front of a magazine, and some of the dankest medicinal strains can be a little bit scraggly looking (its the chemistry that counts), but not putting a picture up and declaring that it is the Marilyn Monroe of weed is a little shady.  

Bag appeal and cannabis aesthetics have, and always will be, a huge part of the buying cannabis seeds process. It doesn’t matter that most people are just going to grind it up into dust and set light to it, if it doesn’t look good there are people that won’t be interested in it. If this isn’t a bother for you then not to worry, but if you and your friends like to take pictures to upload or you just like growing pretty flowers, try not to get sucked into the embellished descriptions without a picture for proof – don’t get catfished.

Check the forums to see if there are any grow diaries of the strain before you buy it. Look for hashtags on social media to see what people are saying. Are there any pictures on Google?

Information on the Parents

If you see a strain that you like the look of, but there is no information on how the seeds were produced, it could be a bad sign. There’s no need to hide the parentage of cannabis genetics, in fact it’s become a necessity in the age of medical cannabis and the patient’s need to get the right medicine when buying cannabis seeds.

If you know that the strain ChemDog works really well for you, being able to see the crosses made with this strain will enable you to make a much more informed decision on your next purchase. Knowing you will get a pack of seeds with a mixture of traits from ChemDog means you can feel confident that there will be something in there that ticks the boxes for your desires. 

There is absolutely no harm in contacting the breeder directly and politely asking what further information they can give you about the parents used. Where did the parents come from, what sort of traits can you expect to look out for from each of the parents? Much of the time, the breeder or someone from the team will happily answer your questions because they like the fact someone has chosen to grow their work out. 

Stability of Breeding

Strains are only as stable as the breeders make them. Some parents are better at passing on traits than others, so knowing that good stable male and female parents have been used is important. If people are leaving feedback saying there’s too much variation in each of the seeds, it can look like not much work has been done in producing them. It really isn’t much effort to grow a male and a female and let nature take its course to produce a big bag of seeds but were the two parents the most suitable to cross?

Beyond knowing what the parents are, it is helpful to know what level of variation you are likely to see when you germinate the seeds. The aforementioned can play a factor in the type of seeds you buy if you are limited to plant numbers due to the fact that you may want some quite specific results. 

If the seed variation in a pack of ten is five different distinguished phenotypes, you may want to pick something that is more stable and only has one or two main phenotypes in the gene pool. This will increase your chances of growing something you hoped and intended to end up with. Seeds that have been made from original parents, say from Trainwreck and Skunk, would result in an F1 cross. If these seeds are then grown out and two parents are selected to then make seeds from d so on to F3, F4 etc. That will stabilise the traits you are selecting for, so the seeds will eventually all produce near enough the same plant each time – which is desirable if you are growing one plant at a time and want the same results.

At any point of an F1+, if the selected offspring needs more of one of the parentage traits to show more, it can be crossed back to that parent. This is called a Backcross. If a strain bears the marks IBL this means it is stable- it simply stands for In Bred Line. Yes, there is a lot of incest but it seems to work well. It’s how landraces have been kept the same for generations and in some cases thousands of years. 

Are They Correctly Stored?

It doesn’t matter where you are buying cannabis seeds, you want to know they have been stored correctly. There is nothing worse than buying a pack of seeds and then they just don’t germinate. If you’ve got them off a friend or someone on the internet you have to have some big trust that they have taken care of them in a specific way. Good seed businesses know the importance of storing seeds correctly.

As mentioned before, their reputation and whole business relies on good practices. They do not want to lose good seed breeders or customers by damaging the seed stock. Buying or trading seeds, you should directly ask “how have they been stored?” rather than, “have they been stored correctly”, or “in a fridge?”. You want to know what their answer is, not give them what you want to hear.