seeds

[mush887]

how long can you keep cannabis seeds before they are unusable, do seeds have a used by date or can they be kept for years.?

[Guest Babybear]

Not to sure dude , some just die an are poped easy i knew a person who had some seeds from 2 or so yrs ago an planted them an 100% germ so far, I think seeds last 2-5 yrs as long as kept in a decent enviroment out of lite for one

[Chev]

how long can you keep cannabis seeds before they are unusable, do seeds have a used by date or can they be kept for years.?

They can be stored for a long time, 10 years or more. Depending how you store them (airtight, lightproof) and I've been told you can deep freeze them.

Just make sure you put them into an airtight container or bag, and store in a dark cool place.(not damp ).

[Ozzy420]

I have keep bag seed for over 10 years i keep it in a little bag and put the little bag inside one of those containers that u get ya film in but use a black one not ones of those clear ones and as chev said keep in a cool dry place and thay should keep for a long time

[mush887]

thanks heaps, 10 years, thats pretty good, I thought 1 year would be max.

[Tom]

I found some 12 - 15 year old seeds in a plastic container once, planted a few and about a third of them popped.

[Luke Skywalker]

Yeah, they say they start to lose efficacy and germ rates drop for every year they're stored, but there are more experiments going on with deep-freezing and other techniques to see if the seed can be put into a form of suspended animation, preventing the inevitable decay of time.

 

But yeah, like Taz said, you can store em for a long time past that 5 - 10 years in good condtions, (almost non-existent humidity, room or low temps and darkness) they do actually germinate after this period, but they just don't have many come out. Those that do you could say are more likely to pass on beneficial genetics, well, at least vis-a-vis seed storability to the future generations bred from it. But in a nutshell, just sow more, and you should get a germ. The plants might take their time too, but they'll get there eventually, unless they've been stored in bad conditions that is.

 

Long term seed storage is an important thing for future breeding, IMO, as we can maintain a strains genetics in storage for a long time, making genetics which had otherwise died out in the growroom, to be professionally bred up and re-released as a strain, or used as genetics for breeding. Makes me wonder about all the genes and potential mutations and traits we've lost over the years, just because someone didn't store the seed well...

 

I learnt about storing seed well the hard way... I'd left the box in what I thought was a dry enough place, but over the next few days we had some of the nastiest weather we'd had all winter... To cut a long story short, I lost a crapload of seed to the dreaded blue-grey molds. A lesson I won't soon be forgetting. I lost not only my MJ but my not insubstantial collections of vegetable, fruit and flower seeds too, and some of them I'd collected myself painstakingly... *sigh* oh well, ce la vie.

[mush887]

thanks heaps, that helps alot. I originally thought that they could only be stored for a year at max.