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, priced cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry 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 sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by never growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.

Not Just Pollen

The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just shows some of those traits less because it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different line of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what is left is close to one plant expressed across slightly different ways.

That is fine for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool altogether. A generation of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of the same few plants, and a breeder trying to create something different discovers there is little left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only exists if somebody grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, since most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders look for.

• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the desired female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male hands that on too.
• Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Restraint. Plants that release huge quantities of pollen all at once are often also the least selected genetically; many breeders prefer steady shedders.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it holds the terpene traits that are worth keeping.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female flowers under normal conditions is discarded outright; that trait is the last thing anyone wants breeding forward.

A Pack Is a Population

The mistake new regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to see the range and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable differences: height, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents that are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents means producing the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main approaches cover most of what home breeders attempt.

• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several picked females, every other plant else culled. The offspring carry the qualities of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
• Backcross. Cross a selected seedling again to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It narrows the range fast and is used when one parent has something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.

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

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard the population as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be also flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above turns regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no service.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a confined space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a known clone-only plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and eventually to produce something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.