Half Male, Fully Worth It: Regular Seeds

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

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

A male contributes growth habit, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different line of selected genes.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different ways.

That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the selected clone vanish from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market full with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to create something new discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir can only exists as long as somebody grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on selecting females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone making seed, these are the signs breeders look for.

• Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures in step with the females is more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that resembles the intended female habit are passed on; a lanky, floppy male hands that down too.
• Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are frequently also the less selected genetically; breeders favour moderate producers.
• 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 suggests it carries the resin traits that are worth passing on.

Thinking in Numbers

A error first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances 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 see the spread and select 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 discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable differences: height, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. That variation 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 now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of chosen parents which are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding selected parents means making the next generation, and here the options open up. The main methods cover most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It tightens the range quickly and is useful when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the other contributed mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
• Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of two specific plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.

All three require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the entire point, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. Expect too aromas and chemistry that no longer exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of collection and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above turns regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and claiming that it is would the product no favours.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins the whole crop inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous cut repeated as closely as possible 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 of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.