Half Male, Fully Worth It: Regular Seeds

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male passes on structure, vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just shows some of those traits less visibly since it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.

This is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a breeder trying to create something new finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and that reservoir only persist as long as people keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, since most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, these are the marks breeders look for.

• Stability. A male that also shows female flowers under normal conditions is discarded outright; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen early are frequently the least selected in other respects; breeders favour moderate shedders.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear scent indicates it holds the resin genes that are worth keeping.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.

A Pack Is a Population

A mistake new regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of running it is to see the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, density, tolerance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding selected parents means producing the next generation, and there the options open up. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation not refinement.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its original parents to lock in a specific quality. It tightens the genetics quickly and is used when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the other contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few chosen females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and express narrower spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is built.

Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them treat the population as the whole value, and reversing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. Expect also aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its region of collection and the generation it has been grown out since the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming that it is does the product no favours.

A grower with room for three plants who wants each one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins everything inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a specific clone-only cut repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and eventually to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.