What are Pre-Seeds?

By: Simon

Unfertilized calyxes swell up after the pistils change colour, almost as if they were fertilized. 

This is best seen at the preflowers as they are separately located at the main stem and therefore well visible. They are the oldest flowers of the plant and because of that they swell up before the majority of the flowers which form buds. 

These flowers are all younger and stay fertile much longer. Inside each calyx you'll find the ovule in which the pre-seed resides. Two pistils grow out from each ovule.

If the pre-seed (or ovule) is fertilized it will swell up and forms a seed which grows inside the calyx.

If the pre-seed is not fertilized it usually won't swell up. But the calyx does: it swells up as if there is a seed inside. It looks like a tiny pear, but it is empty and there is no seed inside.  

The pre-seeds are always present in sinsemilla weed but this is usually no problem at all. Everybody smokes the soft and usually green pre-seeds without realizing it.  

Sometimes the pre-seeds harden up a bit, almost like a small seed. This seems to happen when sinsimilla weed is not harvested in time but the plants are left to continue to flower. 

We have seen that some plants do show their pre-seeds as a sort of small infertile seeds. They pre-seeds stay small, do not swell up but rather form a sort of small seed, which gets noticed because it is darker coloured and not soft but more or less hard like a small seed. 

People get all sorts of ideas when they notice pre-seeds. Ideas like: "these are small seeds so there must be free pollen around. There must be hermie's or male plants around. Neighbours have fertilized my plants by spreading pollen. etc"

But there is nothing to worry about. These are still pre-seeds and no seeds. There is no free pollen around else they would have swollen up to form real seeds. This means that there (probably) was no free pollen, no male plants and no hermies. 

Although we have received less than five emails about this topic in our 30 years existence it may be so that some plants form darker and harder pre-seeds than other plants do. 

And it may be so that one plant grows these small dark and bit hard structures earlier than other plants. Maybe some plants show these darker, hard pre-seeds already towards the end of the normal flowering cycle. Although the first person still has to come forward to show us that they have found such plants. 

It is like with all other characteristics of organisms: there are differences between individuals. 

And although it doesn't seem impossible that some plants could grow little dark unfertilized pre-seeds while still growing fresh flowers, we have not heard about the existence of such plants yet. 

Personally we have never seen any problems with noticeable pre-seeds in weed from sinsimilla plants. Only when plants were left to flower longer than their normal flowering time (sativa plants to see if they would continue to grow more flowers), we have noticed those small dark pre-seeds. These pre-seeds were dark and a bit hard and you did notice them when you smoked that weed. The pre-seeds popped in a joint and gave this typical seed smell.