Choosing between regular and feminized cannabis seeds is an important decision for growers, especially when buying seeds online. This guide compares these two seed types in clear terms, covering their genetic makeup, cultivation differences, breeding uses, cost, and other factors. The goal is to provide an objective overview of the benefits and drawbacks of feminized seeds versus regular seeds, helping you make an informed choice.
Genetic Differences
Regular cannabis seeds are produced by traditional male-to-female pollination and can grow into either male or female plants. In a batch of regular seeds, roughly half the plants will be male and half will be female. This reflects the normal genetic diversity found in nature, as regular seeds carry the full set of genetics to be male or female.
Check out: Top 15 Regular Seeds
Feminized cannabis seeds, on the other hand, are bred specifically to produce only female plants. Breeders create feminized seeds by inducing a female plant to produce pollen (normally produced only by males) and then using that pollen to fertilize another female plant. Since both “parents” are female, the resulting seeds contain almost exclusively female genetics and will develop into female plants about 99% of the time. Basically, feminized seeds lack male chromosomes, so virtually every plant from a feminized seed will be female.
Check out: Top 15 Feminized Seeds
Growing Considerations
Ease of Cultivation: Growing from regular seeds requires a bit more work because you must identify and remove male plants as they appear. If male plants are left among females, they will release pollen and cause the female flowers to produce seeds, which greatly reduces the quality and yield of the buds.
This means regular-seed growers need to monitor their crop and eliminate males early (a process known as “sexing” the plants) With feminized seeds, this step is mostly eliminated… since ~99% of the plants will be female, growers don’t have to worry about rogue males. Feminized seeds therefore simplify the grow by ensuring all plants can produce buds.
Yield Differences: Feminized seeds can lead to a higher effective yield of usable buds for a given number of plants. Because all the plants from feminized seeds should be female, none of your grow space is wasted on male plants that don’t produce buds. In contrast, with regular seeds, typically only half of the plants (the females) will yield bud, while the male plants must be removed and yield nothing.
Unless you plant extra seeds to compensate, the presence of males can lower the overall harvest from regular seeds. In practical terms, a pack of 10 feminized seeds might produce 10 flowering females (maximizing bud production), whereas 10 regular seeds might yield around 5 females after discarding the males.
Check out: Highest Yielding Strains
Indoor vs. Outdoor Suitability: The choice between feminized and regular seeds can also depend on your growing environment. Growers with limited space – for example, indoor growers with a small tent or garden – often prefer feminized seeds so they don’t waste any room on non-budding male plants. In a small indoor grow, every plant counts, and feminized seeds ensure all of them will be productive females.
Check out: Best Indoor Strains
By contrast, for large outdoor gardens or guerilla grows with plenty of space, regular seeds can be a practical and cost-effective option. Outdoor growers can sow more regular seeds than needed and simply cull the males once they show their sex, which is feasible when space isn’t tight. Regular seeds are also cheaper (as discussed below), so planting a higher number of seeds to end up with the desired count of females can be economical for big outdoor projects
Check out: Best Outdoor Strains
Basically, both feminized and regular seeds can be grown successfully indoors or outdoors, but feminized seeds offer more efficiency in confined or controlled environments, whereas regular seeds are often utilized by those who can manage larger numbers of plants.
Breeding Potential
If you plan to breed cannabis or create new strains, regular seeds are essential. Regular seeds will produce male plants, and male plants provide the pollen needed to fertilize female plants and make new seeds. Breeders use regular seeds to cross different parent plants and combine genetics. Feminized seeds, by contrast, have limited breeding potential because they produce virtually no males.
Without a male plant, it’s not possible to perform a traditional cross between two different strains. While advanced growers can force a female from a feminized seed to produce pollen (using the same methods used to create feminized seeds in the first place), this is a specialized technique. For most breeding projects, growers rely on regular seeds to obtain male plants and maintain genetic diversity.
Essentially, regular seeds offer full breeding capabilities (letting you create hybrids or new strains), whereas feminized seeds are only useful for advanced breeders using reversal techniques.
Price Differences
Feminized seeds are usually more expensive to buy than regular seeds. This price difference is because feminized seeds undergo a specialized breeding process and are in high demand for their convenience. Seed banks often charge a premium for feminized versions of a strain. In general, feminized seeds cost more per seed (or per pack) than regular seeds of the same strain.
Regular seeds tend to be more affordable, making them a budget-friendly choice for growers. For example, a pack of regular seeds might be significantly cheaper than a pack of feminized seeds from the same breeder. Growers on a tight budget or those planning to plant many seeds (as in outdoor fields) often opt for regular seeds to save money.
Check out: Cheap Weed Seeds
On the other hand, some growers don’t mind paying extra for feminized seeds since they won’t have to invest time and resources in raising males that end up discarded.
Market Availability
In today’s seed market, feminized seeds dominate in terms of availability and selection. The vast majority of cannabis seeds sold commercially are feminized. In fact, industry reports indicate that over 95% of all cannabis seeds on the market now are feminized seeds.
Nearly every popular strain is offered in feminized form, and breeders continually release new feminized strains to meet the demand from growers who want easy, all-female crops. This means as a consumer you’ll find a much larger variety of feminized seed options available from seed banks. From classic strains to the latest hybrids, most are obtainable as feminized seeds.
Check out: Best Seed Banks
Regular seeds, by comparison, have become less common on the market. Many seed companies produce fewer regular seed lines, focusing instead on feminized (and autoflowering) lines for their main catalogs. However, regular seeds are still valued by traditional growers and breeders despite their smaller market share. They are often available from specialized or “old-school” breeders and seed banks.
Regular seeds are favored by breeders and enthusiasts who want to preserve genetic diversity or create new crosses. Experienced growers who prefer to start from seed and select mother plants for cloning may also seek out regular seeds to have a broader genetic pool to work with.
Basically, while you’ll find far more feminized seed options in stores (with feminized seeds being the market majority), regular seeds are still obtainable and play an important role for those interested in breeding or maintaining time-tested genetics.
Old-School Beliefs
Some long-time cultivators maintain that regular seeds are more “natural” and may produce healthier genetics and more vigorous plants. The idea is that regular seeds come from standard, time-tested male-female reproduction, whereas feminized seeds involve a form of artificial manipulation to eliminate males.
Because of this, some growers claim that plants grown from regular seeds have stronger genetics and greater hardiness. For example, it’s often said that regular seed plants are less prone to becoming hermaphrodites (developing male flowers) under stress. This belief partly stems from the fact that a feminized seed is often the result of a female that was stressed to produce pollen… some worry that this could pass on a tendency to “herm out” (turn intersex) in the offspring.
Regular seeds, which come from a stable male and female cross, are seen as having a proven genetic lineage and thus are considered by some to be more stable or resilient. However, these claims are anecdotal and not scientifically proven, or unproven, at this time.
Well-bred feminized seeds from reputable breeders can grow just as vigorously and produce yields just as high as regular seeds. In recent years, feminized seed production has improved to the point that hermaphrodite issues are rare.
So, while regular seeds might be preferred by purists who value the traditional, natural breeding history, a high-quality feminized seed will perform on par with a regular seed in most cases.
The choice often comes down to personal preference and trust in the breeder… certain growers simply feel more confident in the longstanding stability of regular seeds, whereas others prefer the convenience of feminized seeds and have had great success with them.
Methods of Feminized Seed Creation
Breeders have developed specific techniques to produce feminized seeds by chemically inducing female plants to produce pollen (in the earliest days, some growers used a natural stress method called rodelization to obtain feminized seeds, but that approach had reliability issues, discussed below). Today, the most common creation methods use chemical solutions to force female plants to grow male pollen sacs, thus producing female pollen that can fertilize other females.
Two widely used techniques are Silver Thiosulfate (STS) treatment and colloidal silver treatment. In an STS method, a solution of silver thiosulfate (made from mixing silver nitrate and sodium thiosulfate) is sprayed onto a female plant at specific stages. This chemical treatment blocks the plant’s ethylene hormone, which in turn triggers the development of male pollen sacs on the female plant.
Check out: How to Breed Cannabis
Essentially, STS tricks the female into developing male flowers full of pollen. Colloidal silver works in a similar way: the grower sprays a female plant with a solution of microscopic silver particles (colloidal silver) every day for a period of time, until the plant starts forming male flowers.
This silver exposure also disrupts hormones and causes the female to grow male-looking pollen sacs. In both cases, the pollen collected from these induced male flowers contains only female genetic material (no Y chromosome). That pollen is then used to pollinate a female plant (often a different female), and the resulting seeds will be feminized seeds—almost all of those seeds will grow into female plants. These modern chemical methods allow breeders to reliably create feminized seeds while maintaining the genetic traits of the female plants they selected.
Early Issues with Feminized Seeds
When feminized seeds were first introduced in the 1990s, growers encountered some issues with hermaphroditism. One early technique for making feminized seeds, known as rodelization, involved stressing a female plant (for example, by letting it flower longer than usual) so that it eventually produced a few male pollen sacs on its own.
The pollen from these “selfed” male flowers would then fertilize the plant (or another female), yielding feminized seeds. While rodelization can produce viable feminized seeds without chemicals, it has a major drawback: it often passes on the trait of hermaphroditism. In other words, because this method relies on a female that naturally turned intersex, the seeds from it have an increased chance of also turning into hermaphrodite plants.
Many early feminized seeds (some created through rodelization or from unstable genetics) had a reputation for producing hermaphrodites under slight stress. This gave feminized seeds a shaky image among some growers in the beginning, leading cautious growers to stick with regular seeds for reliability.
Modern breeders have largely resolved these issues by using better techniques and parent plants. The use of STS and colloidal silver (as described above) allows breeders to control the feminization process more precisely, without relying on a plant that naturally “herms”.
By selecting very stable female parent plants (ones that show no hermaphroditic tendencies) and then inducing pollen with chemical sprays, seed producers can create feminized seeds that carry minimal risk of hermaphroditism. In fact, well-made feminized seeds today are considered just as stable as regular seeds under proper growing conditions.
Reputable seed companies now feminize strains in a way that the resulting seeds will stay female unless they are exposed to extreme stress. The early problems of surprise male flowers popping up have been greatly reduced.
Check out: Best Cannabis Breeders
Essentially, while the first generation of feminized seeds sometimes had issues, today’s feminized seeds from quality breeders are very reliable—growers who provide a stable environment can expect nearly all plants from feminized seeds to be healthy females, with no unwanted male flowers.
Comparison Table: Feminized vs. Regular Seeds
| Factor | Feminized Seeds | Regular Seeds |
|---|---|---|
| Sex of plants | ~99% female (virtually all plants are female) | ~50% female : 50% male (each seed can produce either) |
| Breeding potential | Limited: produces no males, so not useful for traditional breeding of new strains | High: produces both males and females, allowing classic breeding and hybridization |
| Ease of growth | Easier to grow: no need to identify or remove male plants; ideal for beginners or small spaces | More work: must sex plants and remove males to prevent pollination; requires vigilance and space to separate males |
| Yield (bud output) | Higher effective yield: every plant can produce buds since all are female (no resources wasted on males) | Lower effective yield: some plants will be males that produce no buds, reducing overall bud output unless more seeds are planted to compensate |
| Price per seed | Usually higher: often more expensive due to the special process and convenience factor | Usually lower: generally cheaper since they are produced via standard pollination and have lower demand |
| Market availability | Very common: dominant in the market; wide strain selection available almost exclusively as feminized varieties | Less common: limited selection; offered by fewer breeders, but still valued by traditional growers and breeders |
Each seed type has its advantages. Feminized seeds are convenient and efficient for growers who want to maximize bud-producing plants and avoid the hassle of culling males. Regular seeds are indispensable for breeding and are preferred by those who value genetic diversity and traditional growing methods. By understanding these differences, you can choose the seed type that best fits your goals and cultivation style.
