My buddy just got some beans from Attitude seed bank.....I took a look at them and wow.....these things look like shit......all small and white lookin.............i'll have some pics up in a bit..............Out of all the seeds he has, only one seed looks worthy of cracking..............
You cannot always go by appearance unless you have a decent amount of experience with the particular strain you are talking about.
Over the years I have grown many strong healthy well producing plants from beans that were small to tiny and some so light green they almost looked a bit white, they all looked immature, like they were not finished, not developed enough to be viable beans.
I grew some Green House Seeds feminized Nevilles Haze and the beans were tiny and a very light lime green. All but one bean popped and they grew like mad, they grew like I lived next to a nuclear power plant or something. I received a pack of 5 G-13 Labs regular beans. They were so small I actually thought they were joke or gag seeds. I gave then a try and all 5 popped and while I did end up with 3 males and only 2 females the gals grew like they were on steroids.
When I began growing, 39 years ago, people had the imagination to think up Star Trek and teleporters and things but no one had imagined seedbanks so for many years if someone grew it was only using bagseed. Because most pot of the era was seedy, there were VERY FEW growers at the time growing sensimilla, beans were not in short supply. Colombian Gold, Acapulco Gold, Panama Red, Dalat, Malawi Gold, Durban Poison, Oaxaca Gold, and similar others flowed like manna from Heaven.
Finding big fat dark, some very spotted, shiny seeds was easy and I would search for ones that were so big they would give an old squirrel a hernia if it tried to pick it up and take it somewhere to bury it. To me, well they had to be the best of the best because they sure as heck looked great. Some were so amazingly colored and patterned that a high quality photograph of them could easily be sold just by capturing the art and beauty some held. They of course had to be the very best of the very best.
After that era we saw a lot of Hawaiian and on average the seeds were fairly different from what I was used to. Not that the seeds were all tiny and white but on average they were smaller and lighter colored and the numbers of the very small and very light colored seeds increased.
To compare them to what I still had stored up of older beans, most of them looked pathetic when compared to the old beans
. going by the standards I had created based on all that I had seen and could use to compare, but not really based on anything other than the visual.
The less impressive beans worked as well as the ones I had been used to.
Moral of the story
.. viable mature beans can come in petite sizes and viable mature beans can come is pastels. Sometimes the two happen at the same time. Because of that unless you are dealing with a strain where its beans are well known to you and what you then get is totally out of the norm, do not judge a book by its cover. It may just be something different than what you are used to, but not necessarily inferior. There is more to a bean than the general size and color a person is most used to seeing, and then uses that and that alone as their yardstick.
One thing worth mentioning, though it might have been mentioned by now, I dont know since I have not read through the thread yet, but you said Attitude as if Attitude produced the beans and is the one responsible for the beans.
Attitude, like any seedbank that is not a small separate one of some breeder just pushing his/her own genetics, is a reseller of what others produce. They purchase packs of seeds and they resell them to the public, as they are received from the breeder/producer/manufacturer. The responsibility for quality is actually that of the supplier of beans to seedbanks. If non-viable beans are sold the seedbank is expected to stand behind them, and a quality one normally will, but then they recoup the costs involved from their supplier, so in the end that is whose responsibility quality product is.
In some cases beans are not even purchased directly from a breeder but instead through a typical middleman/wholesaler. In cases like that it is even more difficult to place full or even as much culpability on the seedbank if low quality beans are the result because now you not only have the level of the quality control of the breeder but the honesty of the wholesaler for a seedbank to have to rely on for what they then sell and will find themselves expected to accept full responsibility for any problems anyone might have with the products. I cannot swear that it is true but the story that I read about how Attitude ended up with some counterfeit beans, whose were they supposed to be again
Dutch Passion possibly .. I cannot recall at the moment
anyway what I read was Attitude was purchasing them through a bean wholesaler who turned out to not be 100% reputable.
Moral of the story: Blame breeders, and even wholesalers if involved, before seedbanks if you receive immature beans. The seedbank did not make them and while maybe you believe they should closely inspect every package of beans they are supplied, well that is really expecting to much from them.
If it is a quality seedbank they have policy in place for nonviable beans and if followed most times the customer will only end up with the loss of time and aggravation of the experience but will not lose out financially, unless they charge in like a bull in a china shop and make a total ass of themselves over it. Even the best seedbanks will just say, bite me, not and then to customers like that. If someone uses a seedbank that will not work with customers who receive nonviable beans and who follow policy, well then you have bigger problems about the seedbank to worry about and it is time to pick a new one.
