HOP Latent Seeds

Why do cannabis plants dud sometimes? Are some plants born at a disadvantage? Or can only poor processes alter growth?

Like all living things, cannabis plants can become infected. One of the most common “infections” plants experience is known as Hop Latent Viroid (HLVd), sometimes colloquially referred to as “Dudding Disease”. This can spread rapidly across a grow room – direct contact with even just one infected plant usually results in transmission to the entire rest of the grow. And as its layman name suggests, these plants don’t show symptoms until they ultimately dud – producing short plants with low yields that bear little resemblance to bud and plant structure their genetics intended.

Sometimes, though, you even get seeds that are already infected — and of course, you won’t find out this is the case until they ultimately dud in your grow room, thus affecting the rest of the harvest. It’s possible to test for these in seed or mother, but not many breeders currently do (@sexualchoxolatefactory and @firstclassgenetics2.0 do, among others). So ultimately, this is something you have to keep an eye out for in your home grow or at work — there’s no way to know if your seed is hop latent or not without testing.