4) Seeds and Strains

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Lesson Summary:

In this lesson, Jack helps you determine where to purchase seeds and which seeds you want. Includes info in strains, auto-flowering seeds, and feminized seeds.

Hello there and welcome back. We are pretty close to starting our grow. Are you excited? I am.

To start your cannabis grow, you need cannabis seeds. You could also start with clones, but clones are difficult to obtain for many people, so in this course we’re going to use seeds. But where do you get seeds? You could buy seeds online, but there are a lot of scammy seed shops out there, sometimes you place an order and you never get your seeds. So we put a link under this video of a safe seed shop, and you can order your seeds there. Also, you don’t have to buy brand new seeds. Maybe you found some, and those seeds will work just as well. But the plants from those seeds will not be as good as if you’d purchased seeds from a professional vendor.

So which seeds should you buy? Now this is going to be a little bit more complicated, but I’m going to make it as easy as possible. And if you bear with me, at the end you’ll know exactly which seeds you want to buy.

Basically there cannabis Sativa and cannabis Indica strains. These overarching strains have different effects on your body. For example, if I smoke a Sativa in the evening, I couldn’t sleep. The thoughts start running in my head, I have new ideas to do stuff, basically I want to get up and go to work. So if you’re a creator or an inventor then this is for you. Indicas on the other hand will make you want to relax and think deeply about things like the meaning of life or where the missing socks go when the dryer eats them. Indicas will relax you and make you sleepy. They also may make you hungry. So the way I see it, maybe God gave us Sativas for our mental health and Indicas for our physical health. But that’s just one of my theories.

In reality we grow hybrid strains, like 60% Sativa and 40% Indica. The reason for that is that those hybrid strains are easier to grow. But even though there are many of these hybrid strains, different strains will maintain their Sativa or Indica qualities. So what do you want, to be active and aware or to be hungry and relaxed? You choose.

Cannabis grows in two stages. At first there’s the vegetative state, that’s when the plant grows branches and leaves, it basically grows a frame. Then in the flowering phase, it will grow flowers on this frame. The flowers are what we want to harvest. The flowers are what we smoke at the end. So how does the plant know when to make the switch from vegetative state to flowering state?

Once the days get shorter in summer, the plant knows that it should start to make flowers because winter is coming soon. In our artificial grow tent we don’t have sunlight, the sun is basically our electric lamp, and while the plants are young, we have this lamp on for 18 hours and we have it off for 6 hours, kind of like the first half of summer where the days are longer than the nights. Then, once our plants are about 4 weeks old, we change the light duration. We switch the light on for twelve hours and we switch it off for 12 hours. Now the plant thinks that winter is on its way, and it’s time to make some flowers.

To confuse you a little bit more, I also want to mention that there are automatically flowering plants. Those plants just suddenly start flowering on their own. They don’t care about the light cycle or how long the light is on and off. You should know that autoflowering plants ripen faster than photosensitive plants, so if you are in a hurry, you want to grow some autoflowers. However, you want to remember that the harvest will be smaller with autoflower plants, so if you want a big harvest you have to grow photosensitive plants, but it will take a little bit longer.

Also there are male plants and female plants. We only want female plants because female plants produce marijuana, male plants don’t. Typically about half of our plants turn out female and half turn out male. We have to remove the males because if we don’t the males will pollinate the females, and a pollinated female will produce seeds, and then our marijuana is full of seeds and it won’t be as strong anymore and the quality isn’t as good anymore.

If you don’t want to deal with male plants at all, you can buy feminized Cannabis seeds. Those have been engineered to produce only females. They’re a bit more expensive, but you end up with only females.

If your head is spinning right now, we’ve put some links to good seeds and good strains under this video. Okay? Now go ahead and get yourself some seeds, and I hope to see you in the next video where we’re going to germinate those seeds. See you soon.

Course Notes

Suggested Products

Enter code GNU-Student for 10% at Growershouse.
(Excludes “Killer Deal” items)
True North Seed Bank
Grow Tent Configurator
HLG 500w Quantum Boards
Quantum Board
Fluence Spyder
Ocean Forest Potting Mix
FloraNova Grow
FloraNova Bloom
pH Up
pH Down
Hanna pH Tester
HM Digital Waterproof Combo Meter
Radix Plant Rooting Compound
Fan
Air Filter
Fan Speed Controller
Timer Switch
Fabric Pots
Mini Germination Greenhouse
Five Gallon Bucket
Glass Curing Jars
Humidity Packs
Scissors
Thermometer/Hygrometer
Grower’s Edge Illuminated Microscope 60x – 100x
Watering Can
AzaMax Biological Insecticide, Miticide, and Nematicide

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4) Seeds and Strains

Course Notes

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