Seed guides

The best seed isn't the strongest or the most famous — it's the one that fits your space, your season and the time you can give it. Before browsing names, picture the grow honestly. How much height can you allow? How many weeks of warm, bright conditions does your climate or your room realistically offer? Are you growing indoors with full control, or outdoors at the mercy of the weather? Answer those first and the catalogue narrows itself.

Think too about what you actually want from the finished plant. A bold, resinous evening type and a clear, gentle daytime CBD line ask for very different expectations, and there's no point chasing a 12-week sativa if your season only gives you ten. Matching the plant to the place is the single biggest favour you can do yourself as a grower. Browse the strains we keep with your own conditions in mind, not someone else's grow tent.

Most growers eventually weigh these two against each other, so it's worth understanding what each really offers. Feminised photoperiod seeds grow into plants that flower when you shorten their light hours (or when autumn nights lengthen outdoors). That dependence on the light cycle is actually a feature: it hands you control. You decide how long the plant vegetates, so you can keep it small for a cupboard or grow it large for a long season, and you can train it patiently before flipping it into flower.

Autoflowering seeds skip all of that. They flower automatically after a few weeks regardless of the light, which makes them fast, compact and wonderfully forgiving — ideal for short summers, stealthy spaces, beginners and anyone who wants a quick turnaround. The trade-off is control: an auto runs on its own clock, so you can't extend its veg to fix early problems, and it tends to yield a little less than a well-grown photoperiod plant.

Neither is "better." Feminised photoperiod rewards growers who want to steer and shape; autoflower rewards growers who want speed and simplicity. Many people keep both for different seasons. If you'd like this broken down further with real grow examples, our blog covers the comparison in more depth.

Seeds are alive, just resting, and a little care keeps them viable for years. The enemies are heat, light, moisture and big temperature swings. Keep your seeds cool, dark and dry — an airtight container with a small silica sachet, tucked at the back of a fridge, is hard to beat. What you want is steadiness: a stable cool temperature does far more good than an extreme cold one that keeps fluctuating.

Avoid the freezer unless you really know what you're doing, since freeze-thaw cycles and condensation can ruin seeds. Label everything with the strain and the date, because a year from now you won't remember. Stored well, good seeds will still germinate strongly long after you bought them — see our germination guide for getting the best from them when their time comes.

A strain's lineage is its family history, and once you can read it you can predict a great deal before the first leaf appears. A cross written as "A × B" simply means one parent was A and the other B; the offspring inherit a blend of both, leaning one way or the other depending on how the line was selected. Knowing the parents tells you roughly what to expect in growth habit, flowering time, flavour and resilience.

Look for clues in the names and notes. Heritage or landrace parentage usually hints at a hardier, more characterful plant that holds the traits of its origins. A line described as "stabilised" or several generations deep means the breeder has worked to make the offspring uniform, so your seeds should grow true to type with little variation. Vague lineage, by contrast, is a fair warning that results may be a lottery. Reading the family tree is how you tell a carefully kept line from a hopeful one — and it's exactly the kind of detail we publish openly for the strains we keep.