If you’re looking to start growing cannabis at home once the Minnesota legalization legislation passes, then you’ll need to learn about seeds and how to grow them. While you will eventually be able to buy clones from retail locations throughout the state, those won’t open for sale until a couple of years after adult-use cannabis is legalized. While you could wait, you’d be missing out on some great homegrown bud in the meantime. And while I have full confidence in Minnesota’s ability to issue licenses for cultivation and retail, other states have given all cannabis users a reason to pause and consider even a small personal grow at home.
When it comes to cannabis seeds, you have a few different choices on type. This doesn’t take into account the strain or the breeder, both of which you’ll want to do research on. That being said, the first type of seed we’ll talk about can affectionately be referred to as “Bag Seeds“. These are the seeds that come in a bag of cannabis that you purchased from your friendly, neighborhood cannabis dealer. A big advantage of these seeds is the price: free (or not exactly free as you paid for the cannabis by weight, but you get what I mean). The obvious con, however, is that you don’t really know what you’re growing. For beginners, knowing what specific strains of plants need ahead of time can be really helpful. You can want to be sure that you’re taking advantage of the four plant limit and only growing genetics that will yield you high-quality cannabis.
When it comes to growing cannabis for home use, you’re looking to have female plants. Those are the ones that produce the buds you’ve likely only seen online (because possession of flower cannabis is illegal in Minnesota, even for medical purposes). To get those, female plants need to be grown in an environment without any male plants so they can avoid being pollinated. Unpollinated female plants, referred to as ‘sinsemilla’ (meaning seedless), produce the highest-potency cannabis. To get only female plants, you should use Feminized Seeds. As the name implies, these seeds will produce only female plants. The process for making these seeds is actually pretty interesting.
Another type of seed is great for beginners who might not know when to switch from veg to flower, or those who don’t want to worry about lighting schedules changing. Autoflower Seeds are great as they will begin flowering automatically (as the name implies, I’m seeing a trend) without an alteration in lighting. By breading powerful cannabis genes with a specific type of cannabis plant (cannabis ruderalis), plants will be slightly less potent and smaller but will also flower at a specific age instead of though environmental triggers.
A great YouTube tutorial on how to germinate seeds can be found here. The video, along with showing how to germinate seeds, also describes phenohunting, which is the process of selectively choosing the strongest genes out of multiple seeds of the same strain. By using this process, you could grow the maximum number of plants allowed until the proposed legislation in Minnesota (i.e. eight), and then only flower the four strongest. While you might waste seeds and kills some plants, you can be sure that the buds you grow will come out as large and dank as they can be.
To learn more about cannabis seeds, including where to purchase them, check out this guide from Leafly: A guide to buying cannabis seeds
For those who are visual learners, check out these guides made by Pevgrow.com:
