Im already planning my next grow and have got soil setup (80% Natural nute free, 20% from soil from males that i pulled up). Will take a pic the setup in the next few days, im gonna literally spread low ryder seeds everywhere, and pull up the males as they come. I was looking at my plants and have realised that i have more seeds than i can count, and thats only from one plant...So why is it that seeds are soooo expensive and it varies from strain to strain. Surely Afghan Kush are just as easy to produce as Low Ryder seeds, so why are they so much more expensive? Also shouldnt they be giving them away the amount of seeds that they harvest?
- The reason some seeds are more expensive usually has do do more with the man-hours put into its production and the homogoniety of the strain in question. A strain that gives a bunch of different phenotypes when you grow them has probably not been in-bred or back-crossed as many times as seeds that all produce plants that are all very similar from seed. These seeds that produce homogenous are great for commercial breeders because you dont need to look as hard for a good mother for clones. With lowryder it's not really practical to clone, so you need the seeds. that means they have to spend alot of time creating them. You are right about the amount of seeds you end up getting though. A cannabis or more likely a hemp plant that is grown specifically for its seed (for use in oils, health care products, foods, etc.) will usually be about 50% seed by weight. Thats a lot of seeds!!! a good way is to put just a teensy pinch of male pollen in a medium sized, airtight bag. wrap the bag around a lower branch or particular bud you wish to pollinate. seal it at the opening of the bag with masking tape or some other easily removeable tape and shake the bag around to get all the pollen onto the bud. be sure to use a pretty small amount, you dont want alot of extra pollen left over to drift out and get all the other buds when you take the bag off. Each individual calyx has the capacity to produce a seed if it can latch onto a pollen grain. alot like sperm and egg. With this method you can pollinate all the lower branches of a mother plant with the pollen from several different males, if you are lucky to have the stock of several desireable males.
- Seeds like lowryder and lowlife are usually a Ruderalis crossed with an indica or sativa, like AK or Kush, or in the case of LR2, Santa Maria, I believe. When this first generation of seeds os grown, only a certain number of the plants will grow up with the desireable auto-flowering trait. The very best of these plants are then crossed only with others that also developed the auto-flowering trait. Thats called in-breeding. In the case of most of these auto-flowering hybrids, they have been in-bred several times and at some point may have been needed to breed back to one of the parent plants or a plant from the F1 generation in order to boost another trait, such as potency or growth pattern, that may have been lost or has gotten too scarce with all the inbreeding for the auto-flowering trait. hope that helps explain why some seeds may be more expensive than others. Lowryders are probably a little harder to breed than alot of other plants... to get the auto without effecting potency. However this may be balanced out with the short turn-around time from generation to generation. you can do 3 or 4 generations of lowryder in one outdoor season, so I imagine that makes it easier to get alot of seeds even though alot of care must be taken when selecting mothers and fathers.