Seed bank review

ILGM seed bank — independent editorial review

I Love Growing Marijuana is a Dutch-founded, US-focused seed bank run by Robert Bergman that has spent the last fifteen years becoming the default mail-order option documented for American home growers. The positioning is straightforward — discreet shipping to all 50 states, a 100% germination guarantee, and a catalogue weighted toward the feminized photoperiod and autoflower lines documented as most commonly sold at hobby scale. ILGM is also the Lockbox affiliate partner of record, so there is a commercial relationship worth being explicit about; the selection followed the same editorial evaluation applied to every bank covered on this site, not the other way around. This review is the reference Lockbox would point a reader to when asked which bank is the documented default.

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Who ILGM is and why it matters

ILGM was founded by Robert Bergman, a Dutch grower who began selling seed online from Amsterdam in 2012 after publishing what was — at the time — one of the better free cannabis grow guides on the public internet. The grow guide is still the front door to the operation, and it documents ILGM's positioning clearly: a bank marketed to beginner-to-intermediate home growers who want a documented path to a finished tent on the first or second attempt. The Dutch root matters because it gave ILGM documented access to the original European seed-line pedigrees the US clone-only market never had legitimate access to — White Widow, Northern Lights, Skunk #1, Amnesia Haze. The US focus matters because the bank documented its fulfillment, payment rails, and customer support around an American buyer from day one, while many competitors are documented as still optimizing for European shoppers and treating the US as a difficult-to-serve edge case. That combination — old-world genetics plus US-native operations — is documented as producing a fifteen-year run as the default mail-order option for an American home grower.

Strain catalogue depth

ILGM's catalogue is documented as running to several hundred strains across feminized photoperiod, autoflowering, and a smaller selection of regular (non-feminized) lines. Coverage is documented as heaviest on the strains most commonly sold at home-grow scale — the OG Kush, Gorilla Glue, Wedding Cake, Blue Dream, Northern Lights, White Widow, and Girl Scout Cookies families — and thinner on rare third-party-breeder exclusives. Of the 100 strains currently tracked in the Lockbox library, 59 are directly matchable to a live ILGM product page; the remaining handful are documented as either clone-only cuts not available as seed anywhere or breeder-exclusive packs sitting on other catalogues. The match rate is a useful signal of what a bank does well. ILGM is documented as performing well on the strains a tent grower most often looks for, and as not claiming to carry breeder-exclusives it cannot ship.

Shipping and discretion

Packaging is documented as the part of a mail-order seed purchase that most reviews skip and most buyers care about most. ILGM is documented as shipping in unbranded outer packaging with no cannabis-related sender name, no leaf logo, and no customs declaration that uses the word "seeds". Seeds are documented as arriving inside a secondary stealth layer — historically a CD case, a birthday card, or a generic plastic novelty depending on the shipping lane. Delivery windows to US addresses are documented at roughly 10 to 20 business days from cleared payment, with tracking issued once the package dispatches. The reshipment policy is documented as the actual safety net: where a package is intercepted, lost, or damaged in transit, ILGM is documented as shipping a replacement at no charge once non-delivery is confirmed. Lockbox has used the reshipment process and the documented result matched the published policy.

Germination guarantee

The 100% germination guarantee is documented as the most-quoted feature of the ILGM positioning and the one that draws the most skepticism, so the mechanics are worth documenting precisely. The guarantee is documented as covering the seed, not the seedling — where a seed fails to crack a taproot using a documented germination method, ILGM is documented as shipping free replacement seeds. The reference method documented on most strain pages is the paper-towel method: soak in distilled water for 12 to 18 hours, transfer to a damp paper towel between two plates, hold at room temperature, and check daily for the taproot. Claims are documented as submitted by email to support with the order number and a brief explanation; photo evidence at the seed stage is documented as not required. The guarantee is documented as not covering seedlings that die after sprouting, hermaphrodites that appear late in flower, or low yields. For a beginner cracking a first pack, the policy is documented as effectively removing the "dud seed" failure mode.

Pricing structure

Pricing is built around 5-seed, 10-seed, and 20-seed pack sizes, with the price-per-seed dropping sharply at the 10-seed and 20-seed tiers. The headline feature is the buy-10-get-10 promotion that runs more or less continuously on a rotating roster of popular strains — when the strain you want is on the promotion, the effective price per seed lands well below the typical European mail-order rate for the same genetics. Off-promotion, a 5-seed pack of a flagship feminized strain typically sits in the US$80–US$110 range, which works out to roughly US$16–US$22 per seed; on the buy-10-get-10 the same strain in a 10-pack lands closer to US$8–US$11 per seed once the freebie pack is counted. The pricing logic favors buying in volume during a promotion rather than buying a small pack at retail.

Payment options

ILGM accepts an unusually wide payment menu by seed-bank standards: Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards, US bank transfer, Zelle, cash sent by mail in a sealed envelope, and several cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Card processing routes through cooperating merchant accounts and occasionally blips when a processor reshuffles — when that happens, bank transfer, Zelle, and crypto are the reliable fallback rails. Cash-by-mail orders take longer because fulfillment only starts once the envelope arrives and is counted, but the rail exists for buyers who specifically do not want a card transaction on a statement. Cryptocurrency payments usually attract a small discount that nudges the price-per-seed down a further few percent.

Customer support and forum

Customer support runs through an email ticket queue with a typical response window of one to two business days outside of major promotion periods, slower during the buy-10-get-10 spikes. Bergman's original grow guide remains free to read on the ILGM site and answers most of the questions a beginner thinks to ask during their first grow. The ILGM Growers Forum is a separate property where customers post journals, ask agronomy questions, and trade phenotype reports — we mention it for completeness rather than recommending a specific thread, since signal quality varies and we do not cross-link to external forums from our review pages. The combination of a free grow guide plus a moderated forum plus support tickets is more hand-holding than most of the bank's competitors offer.

The 90-day affiliate cookie

ILGM sets a 90-day affiliate cookie when a visitor clicks through from a partner site. In practical terms this means a click from a Lockbox link today still credits a purchase made any time in the next 90 days, including purchases initiated from a Google search rather than a fresh click on Lockbox. The 90-day window is unusually long — most seed-bank affiliate programs run 30-day cookies, and several run 7-day windows. The downstream effect on a reader is that you do not have to convert on the first click for an independent reviewer to be funded. You can read, leave, compare, come back, and order; the bank still tracks the referral. That is the structural reason Lockbox writes honest reviews of ILGM rather than push-to-cart copy.

When ILGM is the wrong choice

ILGM is documented as the right seed bank for a fairly specific buyer profile, and the cases where it is documented as the wrong pick are the reason the review exists. A buyer chasing a clone-only cut — the original GG4, the Cookies-line cuts, anything traced to a specific Florida or California mother without a stabilized seed-line equivalent — is documented as out of luck at any seed bank, and ILGM specifically does not claim to carry those. A breeder needing regular (non-feminized) seed at scale to pull males for pollen chucks is documented as finding a small selection at ILGM but not enough depth for a serious breeding program; Sensi Seeds and Seedsman are documented as running deeper regular-seed catalogues. A buyer specifically wanting a breeder-exclusive pack from Royal Queen, Barney's Farm, or a smaller European breeder that does not retail through ILGM is documented as best served by the breeder's own site or a multi-brand reseller. For the documented standard case — a US-based home grower who wants discreet shipping, feminized or autoflower seed of a strain whose reputation is already established, and a real germination guarantee — ILGM is documented as the default answer. Outside that case, Sensi Seeds, Seedsman, and Royal Queen Seeds are documented as the alternative references.

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