Half Male, Fully Worth It: Regular Seeds

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less since it never grows a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a different line of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is essentially one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

This is acceptable for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone disappear out of the population entirely. A decade of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something new finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it only persist if people keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, because most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, floppy male hands that on too.
• Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently the less selected genetically; breeders favour moderate producers.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under normal conditions is rejected without exception; that trait is the one thing anyone wants carrying forward.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong scent indicates it carries the terpene genes that are worth passing on.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The error new regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the range and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of chosen parents which are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning selected parents means producing the next generation, and here the options multiply. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the traits of the two specific plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a stable line is made.
• Backcross. Take a chosen offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mostly vigour.

All three need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not in a small room. Expect also aromas and chemistry that no longer exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above makes regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the product no favours.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone unable to check the plants each day during the start of flower, since a missed male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a specific clone-only plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and eventually to produce something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.