Thanks TS - trying to educate oneself a bit no the folks history of cannabis is an interesting task!! This helps... lots of stuff in there.
AT the very least I lear a bit about strains when I read this stuff - even if many of the stories are both true and not true at the same time...
Some of the history is a bit... sordid. Quite a lot of it, actually - a lot of the principles would make good soap opera stars, because they already have the mindset of the characters down pat
.
And some of this is distressing (and depressing). If a devious son of a b!tch happens to have bred a strain or two, and then given it more or less freely to a lot of other breeders... and at least some of those breeders have "spread the genetics throughout his collection" (Mal at Nirvana Seeds, for example, has used Skunk #1 as a parent (grandparent, etc.) for many of his strains)... and cannabis eventually becomes legalized at the federal level in the USA, then Mr. Devious will be able to pull a Monsanto: Lay claim to the genetics he bred and then force growers to buy his seed, pay a court-enforced penalty for refusing to give in, and put non-cooperative seedbanks/breeders out of business.
This seems to be an impossibility? Yeah, well... Monsanto has managed to ruin more than one small farmer - who had, previously, grown heirloom seeds passed down through the generations - after the farmers' crops got polluted with Monsanto-owned genetics... by seed
literally falling off of a truck! And then the farmer's entire collection of seeds became
suspect, of course.
There will always be cannabis seeds quietly passed around among friends, of course (although there seems to be less of it in the era of Internet-connected seedbanks than there were before everyone had easy access). But it could really harm commercial entities which, by definition, need some sort of public presence in order to do business.
The above applies to the USA - where it is possible to patent an organism's genetics. I do not know about other countries, whether they honor USA patent-holders' rights, whether they even allow such patents in the first place, et cetera.
Who gives a fuck about identification when you can get 15+ seeds for under 20 Euro
It may take longer to find the thing you want but
By that logic, maybe you should consider purchasing non-certified viable hemp seeds, lol. You can get them for $40 per pound (in the USA). Non-certified means (among other things) that any buds harvested from the resulting plants are not
guaranteed to be .3% or less THC(a) and/or 3% or less CBD(a) - and, since a pound of them averages something like 27,000 seeds, lol, the odds of finding at least one decent (for our purposes) one seems pretty good. Of course,
it may take longer to find the thing you want...
Yes, I am being (somewhat) facetious. But I have never understood the anger that people have in regards to the price of cannabis seeds. If I pay (for example) $200 for 10 seeds - and, admittedly, doing so would constitute a hardship for a person who sometimes has to spend that much or less for a month's food - and, even with the associated costs to grow the stuff, cannot produce a harvest that is worth
at least that much in bud, whether it's bud I choose to sell (which I no longer do) or bud that I don't have to go out and purchase... then something is terribly wrong with me and my ability to grow plants. How much
does an ounce of even halfway-decent bud cost these days? $150? $200? More? I learned a few months ago, when trying to buy my brother a birthday present, that the rumors are true - some people actually sell cannabis for $20 per
gram. Well f*ck me, lol, I can get a
seed for that much
. And that seed - which, surely, will produce more than a gram on average, even if it's part of a $200 ten-pack and two to six end up being males - can end up producing hundreds (or more) clones and/or, easily, thousands of seeds. A cannabis seed is like the gift that keeps on giving (even if you have to pay something for it, initially).
I just felt like a good rant
.
There's nothing wrong with growing cannabis from seeds that were originally sold five for $30 or even cheaper. I've done it, myself, and will continue to do so
because I don't place a priority on the cost of seeds. But at the same time, automatically refusing to consider a strain because its seeds are "expensive" is, potentially, shooting oneself in the foot in the figurative sense.
Sometimes, I give people seeds. I don't look at the price tag, merely consider whether or not I'll be growing the strain in the future and how many I have. Sometimes, people give me seeds. I've received seeds that cost less than a dinner for two in a restaurant for an entire pack, and I've received ones that cost (checks on the price of Mr. Nice Mango Haze at a random "seedbank superstore") $191.69 per pack. I greatly appreciated both sets. I assume that the giver didn't think about the price when es was putting together that little care package. The person knew that I'd appreciate all of them, along with the fact that the person was kind enough to give me some seeds.
It doesn't happen all that often, but breeders and seedbank owners do occasionally get busted. Even if they don't end up in jail, they might lose their mother/father plant lines - and have to endure a lot of hassle. So I figure if someone is willing to publicly advertise their business, sell me seeds, and do so in such a way that either I don't have to give identifying information or that information is disposed of post haste so that IF they get nailed, I don't have to worry about the
personal repercussions... and they decide to charge me a little more than just their gross operating expenses plus "standard retail markup," well, that's okay with me. I don't mind the thought of helping a regular Joe die rich, especially if/when he provides so much value. Beats spending my money at ChinaMart, I reckon. . . .