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SEED BANKS Attractively priced feminised quality seeds
Interview with Sweet Seeds The Spanish Sweet Seeds, a seed bank specialising in feminised seeds, conquered first Spain and then went on the conquer the whole of Europe. The secret of this seed bank is that they’re close to the grower and they have a good nose for what the public wants: in the first place of course, feminised quality seed for an outstanding price. As well as that, Sweet Seeds offers a number of unique package deals, such as special Collectors Editions with three different varieties per package, or the possibility of putting together a combination of different strains one’s self. Sweet Seeds is one of the first seed banks to plunge in to autoflowering varieties, a section in the catalogue that is still being developed. Before the lads from Sweet Seeds began their company they were growers themselves, who out of dissatisfaction with what was on offer decided to tackle things quite differently. Undoubtedly, their customers are grateful to the guys, and that is proven by the rapid growth of the company and the many prizes with which Sweet Seeds varieties have been crowned in various cannabis competitions. Meanwhile, the seed bank J. Searcher has been steaming full ahead… In recent years you have had an impressive series of prizes credited to your record. In fact, thanks to the entries from various Spanish growers you have even won more than any other seed bank, and this year too there have been more awards bestowed on Sweet Seeds. What are your most honoured plants, and what do you think they owe their success to? Sweet Seeds is delighted with the recognition and the success achieved by our varieties both in Spain and abroad. We have not been in existence as a seed bank all that long, so at this moment it is the varieties that we have in our range that have won the most prizes: Cream Caramel, Black Jack, S.A.D., Sweet Tai and Ice Cool. It is clear that their success in cannabis competitions is down to the recognition from gourmet experts who know what the end product of a canna-
The Sweet Seeds shop
bis plant should be all about: an intense, pleasant aroma, potency, a good taste, the quality and quantity of the trichomes, the strain’s effect, etc. We really want to take this opportunity to thank all the cannabis growers for entering Sweet Seeds varieties in the various cannabis competitions where they live. Often we do not even know who they are. Every time when one of our varieties wins a prize we feel very honoured, so thanks again, champions! Although you have been around for a decent amount of time your seed bank has only recently taken the international market by storm. What is behind this sudden international expansion? We assumed that our success in Spain was a visiting card with which our distributors could present us to other mar-
kets. In the last two years we have made a huge publicity offensive at an international level in order to increase our name recognition and to get attention for our range in the important cannabis periodicals in other countries. We should not forget that it is the quality of the seed that is the most important factor with which to keep your customers happy and build sustainable success on the cannabis market, both in Spain and elsewhere. Thanks to our low prices we offer an outstanding quality-price point, and that is certainly in this time of economic crisis something to be reckoned with. At the same time it is also important for us to offer shops and distributors a good, fast service. And naturally you always have to be aware, stay alert and remain open to the possibilities of innovation and improvement in a dynamic global market that is completely exploding.
Cream Caramel
An old Blueberry mother Can you say something about your breeding philosophy? We have a simple breeding philosophy; in the first place we are cannabis consumers and collectors of genetics, which is to say, we make a selection of the best genetics that we can get our hands and store these for an unlimited time, so that we can enjoy them today, tomorrow or in 20 years. The criteria that we apply in order to select our best mothers have in the first case to do with the desired qualities of the plants, and not with their origin, ancestors or family tree. With these exceptional plants we use both traditional and modern breeding techniques to arrive at populations of 99.9% female plants. At the moment we are also very busy with the development of new varieties of feminised 100% autoflowering varieties. We think that cannabis is a gift from nature and that no single variety should be the property of anyone, but is something that should be for all humanity to benefit from. We try to share with people who are looking for the – according to us – absolute best quality genetics, people who recognize our passion and love for the cannabis plant. The best way to protect a cannabis variety is to share it with us. When you had just begun you gave out a lot of information on how to make feminised seed. Are you going to do that again? When we began making feminised seed we published reports of our experiments on cannabiscafe.net, the most popular Spanish language cannabis forum on Internet. In that time the method of feminisation without using gibberellic acid was still a well-kept secret, one that only a few growers worldwide knew and at the time had only just started to creep out on to the Internet. We were at that time not busy with Sweet Seeds, and it
seemed to us a nice gesture to share this knowledge with the world via Internet, and in doing so the forum members could determine its truthfulness. These days there is a huge number of seed banks; it is a sector that has developed very strongly in Spain, and the competition is enormous. We have not stopped experimenting and perfecting our techniques, but although there is certainly good communication and exchange of information between the majority of Spanish seed banks, it is also a fact that there is a lot of information that is not shared with competitor companies. What is your take on the issue of stability? Do think it is more important that plants are homogenous or that you can choose from various options? For us a variety is stable when the individuals that form a population keep the characteristics that define a variety in future generations. We describe a seed generation or population as stable when there is no variation in the characteristics of the individual plants that come from it. The famous F1 seeds for example consist of a population or generation of stable seeds, but there are no stable varieties because the following generations that ensue are not. The most extreme example of a stable generation or population - that is to say 100% stability of all characteristics – is a population in which the individual plants are clones of the same mother. In this example every plant is an identical copy of each other and we should find no individual variation. But those of you who have grown plants from the same mother will have noticed that there are always a couple of plants
