TH seeds discontinuing their regular seeds?

[bigbadbiddy]

Howdy folks,

just read that on some vendor pages.

Anyone got any infos?

I'm not too fond of TH seeds but they do have some reputable strains and aren't one of "those breeders" in my book.

Seems to me they are going the way of Positronics and could be another breeder to cross of the list ...

 

[Mystic Funk]

yeah, I think they have been doing this for awhile now. I was going to buy their bubblegum but it was only in fem.
so I got some bubblegum from serious seeds instead. I do everything I can to not buy fem seeds. but it's getting harder and harder. so sad...

peace
-mystic

 

[bigbadbiddy]

I checked into their Bubblegum around the start of this year and it was still available here or there in reg.

Remember some promotion on oa$eeds about Bubblegum from TH and they had it regular.

Was quite surprised by this.

Then again, I doubt any of the truly reputable and "good" breeders will go the "we only sell fems so we can cash in"-route, so I guess good riddance to those who do.

Like I said, Positronics came to mind. Afaik they are an afterthought since they did the fem move.

What little respect I had for TH and the perennial consideration in my breeding projects went out the window with that move.

 

[latscholax]

There was a time when TH was one of those reputable and "good" breeders...last thing i got from them was their MK Ultra when it came out...Made me quit to even considder them, supposedly around the time when the eliteclone pollenchucking pest startet to grow strong among dthe dutch companies. Not much reliable of the good old breeders left, to buy from...Only Serious comes to my mind..

 

[VonBudí]

People voted with their money, when greenhouse did the same everyone moaned till jack/who ever came on here and pointed out that for every regular pack that sold, they sold 50(?) fem packs, cant remember the exact figure but it was fairly dramatic.

what do/did you recommend from positronics?

 

[MJPassion]

When a guy I know got white seeds sent to him, directly from the breeders, I said their game is finished.
Now going to fem...

Nails in the coffin...

 

[latscholax]

I suppose all those comps. do most of their business in EU. Growing becomes more n more popular here, also to younger people. My experience is, they don't want to accept a longer learning curve, get knowledge about all the different strains, growing methods, etc.. They just buy a Tent, expensive Equip and want to know about yield even before they fired up their bulb the first time. A friend had a growshop and hanging out there, a few hours a week was VERY funny... they're not interested in long term keepers, crossing , breeding etc.. They just buy some femed Ladyboys, at least one OG in the name...genetic loss, all tastes the same, low quality standard as a result isn't their cup of tea..
I also noticed that real quality weed is uncommon. Party with students, smoking some selfmade Blueberrycross with a friend,induced bad things ; some boys bragging it was chemically treated "LSD Weed" that made them puke and this "strange taste" they had never had before...

 

[MJPassion]

I suppose all those comps. do most of their business in EU. Growing becomes more n more popular here, also to younger people. My experience is, they don't want to accept a longer learning curve, get knowledge about all the different strains, growing methods, etc.. They just buy a Tent, expensive Equip and want to know about yield even before they fired up their bulb the first time. A friend had a growshop and hanging out there, a few hours a week was VERY funny... they're not interested in long term keepers, crossing , breeding etc.. They just buy some femed Ladyboys, at least one OG in the name...genetic loss, all tastes the same, low quality standard as a result isn't their cup of tea..
I also noticed that real quality weed is uncommon. Party with students, smoking some selfmade Blueberrycross with a friend,induced bad things ; some boys bragging it was chemically treated "LSD Weed" that made them puke and this "strange taste" they had never had before...

Sounds like some poorly grown chemical salts unflushed crap ta me...

Most are NOT chronaseurs but rather consumers & not much else.

 

[Nup]

What is wrong with feminised seeds, in of themselves?

Or are you guys simply talking about a drop of quality in favour of more cash for fems, and the likes?

 

[bigbadbiddy]

I absolutely don't fault TH seeds for their move.
From a business standpoint, it makes sense, especially if you have been long removed from being everybody's darling (the Bubblegum, Sage etc. days).
And people, as said above, are voting with their wallets and buying fems galore.

I mean even the worst salesman would have an easy time to push feminized seeds on an uninformed newbie grower and it is up to them to become informed newbies before opening their wallets.

So yeah, I don't fault them.

But that doesn't mean I have to respect them.

TH Seeds was once a household name.
Now they chose to take a place among the nobodies like Greenhouse, Royal Queen et al.

Slightly salty about the loss of genetics in the process but oh well.

Nail's in the coffin for them as MJPassion said.


/Edit
Careful with Serious Seeds Latscho.
They are not at "that level" but they are far removed from their previous glory days as well.
If you research what they did with the AK47 and continue to do, you might want to hyphenate that "reliable good old breeders" part.

But there are some others from the old days like Mr Nice and Cannabiogen and a good bunch more from more recent times, like Ace, Bodhi, Karma etc.

The funniest thing in all this current commotion and change to me, is that Nirvana is considered one of those "good old breeders" nowadays while they were considered thieves and shamed publicly by everyone and their mothers for buying seeds and then selling untested F2s of the same strain under their own label.

But they apparently did a lot better job at preserving their genetics than many who call themselves "breeders".

/Edit
@Nup
If you read a bit into feminization of seeds, you will quickly come to realize that all feminized seeds come from hermaphrodite plants.
Now hermaphrodites are not in themselves the end of all that is cannabis.
But whenever such plants are crossed to regular plants, the hermy trait gets passed on.
Way down the line, possibly generations later, that trait can fuck yo shit up.

The only real purpose that feminized seeds serve is instant gratification and ease of use for unexperienced growers.
But most would argue that it is better for literally everyone involved (and even those that aren't) if a new grower would go through a few less than stellar harvests because he had to cull some males, gets more experience with the plant as mother nature made it (i.e. propagating through male + female) and move on from there.

The fact that more and more people are buying feminized seeds because they can't be bothered to learn a bit about the plant, biology, etc. before farming their ganja directly leads to a weakening of the cannabis gene pool as a whole.

I mean we have hermy genetics introduced into the cannabis gene pool quite heavily as it is because of the popularity of all the chemdawg genetics (OG Kush et al).

So if you could go ahead and inform yourself a bit more about feminized seeds before going ahead and weakening the gene pool, that would be great.

You can still go ahead and say "lol that old geezer, Ima do what I want". But at least you will know what you are doing and not do it inadvertedly.

 

[latscholax]

I'm not that much into genetics but i made s1 by STS several times myself, mostly to preserve depleted mothers. It was always the same they lost vigor and potency compared to the motherplant. sometimes barely noticeable, sometimes very obvious, also they were mostly like clones. Very little variation in the progeny. should be the point with the most impact on evolution. Mutation and expression of extreme traits is the key to evolution as far as i understand this. By only producing fem. you steal the biggest part away. The Heterosis effect(dunno if it's the same in english) is what causes Hybridvigour, healthyness etc... the expression is stronger if the parents genes differ as much as possible from each other. If the genepool in general shrinks, this will also be much rarer..

For many of the so called breeders i think it's mostly money. Save time: Get "eliteclone" make STS x other Eliteclone = Profit.
I consider breeding as get landrace / IBL /good clones, select, stabilize, possibly make F1 or be happy with good IBL..But this takes time and requires knowledge of plants= less $$$

@bigbadbiddy i think it's also dependent on experience you made. I didn't do much from the "classic" breeders in the last years mostly due to bad rep. Serious is the only i didn't ever made bad exp.in opp. to Mr. Nice. I love the SSH, its one of my all time keep around favs, but the rest i tried of them was all very mediocre or even worse...i think it was about 4-5 strains i tried..ortega was a bad joke.

 

[bigbadbiddy]

Yeah personal experience definitely weighs in heavily in the whole thing.

It's the nature of the "business". In the future that should change as it becomes legal everywhere, there will be centralized testing agencies and other places where experiences can be better compared and collected.
In the current state this forum and a few others are some of the very few places where this can be done and thus the experiences, opinions etc. vary greatly and it is very hard to get an actual overview of the whole thing.

There are good plants to be found by anyone, obviously.

And it does not surprise me that Serious has some primo genetics left in their stock.

I was just so disappointed in them for losing the AK47 parent(s) and then misleading the public about it for so long, only kind of admitting to watering down the strain after years of people buying their seeds and reporting negatively.
That was not an acceptable move imho.

The second strain that interested me the most from Serious was Bubblegum.
And here, again, they messed up the strain and didn't preserve it correctly, introducing hermy traits through their feminization efforts and not being upfront about it.
Furthermore, over years, more and more people complained that this is no longer "the Bubblegum".

After these 2 strikes, serious was out of the breeders olympus in my book.

But I am quite certain that things like their Kali Mist, that were apparently preserved correctly, are very good genetics. It would really surprise me if a 10 pack would not yield at least a few great phenos.

While with the AK47 and Bubblegum I would say (according to my research) that there is a very high chance that all phenos would be disappointing in a 10 pack. And that is not acceptable with that price tag.

So Serious, to me, is somewhere in between the good and the bad.

Mr. Nice, well if your experience wasn't great, that's that I suppose.

I will admit that I drank from the chalice of MRN kool-aid quite heavily.

But so far it has not disappointed at all.
In terms of growth structure and vigor, the MRN strains are currently nothing but a pleasure. Will see after the harvest etc. but I can't imagine they are anything less than stellar.


I did hear that the Ortega is a very flimsy one and hermy prone in certain environments and if you don't trim the lower leaf nodes.
Did get a bit more than 30 seeds of it and will make up my own mind on the strain in the future. We shall see.

 

[latscholax]

Well i know AK since the mid/end 90s when it was all over the shops in NL(NL not far from here..) For me it was always a "commercial" as well as WR(Smell, bag appeal,big yield). I tried them later as seed in about 05 and for me it wasn't a big difference as good as my memory is Big yielding, easy plant, very fruity, stony...
BG i only had from cut 2-3 years ago and it was as expected. Nowadays im very grateful they preserved Magus stuff. I looked over it for years, lately tried and DD and WL are very nice.
As far as MNS (same counts for TH) goes SSH was the first i had from them and it's still one of my all time Fav. Never had a bad plant out of a pack, all very nice specimen. After this i tried BW,Devil, La Nina, Ortega, Med.Men. BW was total crap, only extremely stretchy "could go forever" sativas, looked like some landrace bagseed to me, not suited for indoor.Devil and ortega with extraordinary count of bunky hemp plants. LN and Med men were ok but boring, nothing special...i have the comparison to pre 2000 sensi /GH Stock(i don'T buy from them nowadays...) and there are worlds in between...possibly i could have found good plants but if i spent that much on a pack, i expect at least to find 1-2keepers. i also don't have the room to select from 3-4 packs. I know Shanti is a nice guy but i'm kinda frustrated with mns...possibly exemplary for my experiences with most of the classic dutch breeders over the last years.
But there's much to explore,you can get good stuff, just do some research, and support the regular bean selling breeders..

 

[bigbadbiddy]

Did you get your packs from the auctions (i.e. Shanti directly) or through a seed vendor?

It seems to me that many times people made bad experiences with MRN they went through a seed vendor while those who bought from them directly through auctions usually are very happy.

I heard many reports of people being unhappy with the Ortega due to hermy tendencies but this is the first I hear of someone being unhappy with strains like La Nina and Black Widow.

 

[latscholax]

All original Breederpacks.BW was about 06, i think Shanti reworked the line, so it's more stable now, but i didn't test it again. For ortega you've heard the rumors. Well the others, i dunno if i had just bad luck but there was nothing to keep, very mediocre end product. For TH Seeds i like the SAGE but all other Strains i tried were unstable Lottery stuff...

 

[bigbadbiddy]

Yeh I'm just asking because I heard several times that people who bought the way more expensive, originally packaged MRN seeds from reputable seed vendors had way worse experiences than people buying the way cheaper seeds through auctions from Shanti directly.

Shouldn't be like that obviously but I have heard that more than once.

I went through the auctions and so far am very pleased with what I got.
MRN is also known for not bottlenecking their strains too hard and actually wanting to have several possible phenos in a pack. Which is why they sell in packs of 15 not 10.

The kicker is that with auctions you get at least 18 beans in every pack, sometimes as many as 25.

In a pack of 18+ I can hardly imagine not finding anything worthy but I always assumed the people that weren't too keen on MRN were those that didn't have the space/desire to run so many seeds and look for a fitting pheno.

Not that they were actually disappointed with all the phenos found in a pack (be it 15+ or 18+).

Quite disheartening to hear of that experience.

I still reserve my judgement until I ran through the seeds myself but in veg they are definitely outdoing the Nirvana seeds I had previous experience with and also the few seeds from another small breeder I am running parallel.

All kind of irrelevant though until I know what the end product is like.

If you ever choose to give MRN another try, I strongly suggest going through their auctions though.
Better price, more and apparently even better (or at least fresher) seeds.

 

[Siever]

I once paid Mr Nice 70 euro for some auctions. I never got the seeds. They always said "the seeds will come, blablabla".
I'll never waste my time on that joker again.

Siever

 

[Scrappy-doo]

Lots of disinfo and pure myth in this thread. Some things beng said are simply not true. You should educate yourselves more on feminized seeds.

 

[corky1968]

I prefer normal seeds.

Chick with dicks seeds scare me. I don't like surprises.

Sexing regular plants isn't very hard.

 

[Mystic Funk]

I prefer normal seeds.

Chick with dicks seeds scare me. I don't like surprises.

Sexing regular plants isn't very hard.

plus you can make more seeds with males around and your not buying a dead gene pool. i'm not only into growing but also preserving seed lines..... but if your only interested in growing for flowers all the power ya. I just think it's a waste of money.
my two cents...




peace
-mystic