What's new
  • Please note members who been with us for more than 10 years have been upgraded to "Veteran" status and will receive exclusive benefits. If you wish to find out more about this or support IcMag and get same benefits, check this thread here.
  • Important notice: ICMag's T.O.U. has been updated. Please review it here. For your convenience, it is also available in the main forum menu, under 'Quick Links"!

Telling traits by Seed Observstion

Arf

Member
I get a variety of sizes, shapes, patterns of seeds from different buds on the same plant.
 

DenverJim

Active member
interesting topic. I have found that seed color is related to plant color. I have some bluemoonshine, sunshine daydream, NL5, Pink and purple lotus, purple wookie seeds that are black, purple ,blue, purple specked, red specked and different shades of each. I think in general terms purple strains generally give a mellower high than green. Plus there are nice to look at.
 

Only Ornamental

Spiritually inspired agnostic mad scientist
Veteran
The pericarp (aka seed hull or shell) is made out of tissue from the mother plant and hence may reflect certain traits from the mother such as high anthocyanidine content (i.e. purple colour). As you may know, some traits have a (co-)dominant or intermediate inheritance and could affect different parts of the plant. Extrapolating the offspring's traits from the seed's appearance may then be as accurate as just looking at the parents or rather it's way less than that but in cases where you only happen to have a seed without knowledge of its parents this kind of magic might be the only trick up your sleeve (that is, if you don't count growing out said seed as a trick :) ).
Some seed traits do correlate with certain plant traits due to in-/voluntary co-breeding versus evolutionary advantages but are only indicative for feral cannabis/hemp v.s. cultivated hemp and drug type cannabis. Most other stuff is likely hearsay and pothead fantasies no better than judging character by looking at someone's nose or fortune telling from lines of the hand.
 

medman225

Member
to a certain degree, within one specific batch from the same female/same grow/same strain, u may be able to glean some characteristics from the seed... becuz let’s say it’s a small seed, well that might tell you that she came from a smaller bract female, and that she may lean a bit more sativa, while bigger seeds could mean bigger bracts, and may lean more indica. specifically within the smaller sativa leaning seeds, i find that a lot of times the weird, no stripped, pure green, almost yellow around the seal of the shell(where it cracks when it germs) tend to lean more towards the mexican genes within a specific strain(for the mex genes i’m referring to DJ SHORTs strains and shanti and nev’s ssh, mangoHz, NevsHz). this becomes harder and harder to do the more poly poly hybrid a strain becomes, simply because you have more parental influences, and those parents are hybrids, so they have differing seed characteristics depending on the pheno, unlike true f1s from land races and even the subsequent f1xf1 & (f1xf1)X(f1xf1) still had parents in them that bred true for one specific seed look, so in a super silver haze, u have the bigger seeds that tend to lean towards the NL and SK to a lesser degree, the smaller sativa seeds that had those mexi looking seeds, and then some super small thai leaning ones with stripes that simply looked like miniature indica seed(nicely developed and stripping)
having said all that. u gotta be very careful, because while u may be able to glean some info, it doesn’t substitute for legit selection and taking each lady all the way to see what the genes hold. people like to act like in veg u can tell a lot of strains apart, but imho that’s crap and often times falls way short of the mark. i’ve seen sativas with straight indica looks in veg, & vice versa, only to let their true genetic leanings come through once in flower.


u also gotta remember, a bigger plant is gonna oftentimes make bigger calyxes/bracts... so these may come off big but may be totally sativa. that is why i say from one batch to the next u can’t compare seeds.... genetics, luck of the draw, environment, how she’s grown, the way she’s grown(huge or 12/12 flip from clone) and more all can affect how things come out.

so imho, don’t put all your eggs in one basket expecting to glean much info from seed characteristics.
 
Top