Half Male, Fully Worth It: Regular Seeds

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists 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 since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by never seeing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy 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 that follows, and half is selected with the same care as the female.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less visibly since it does not grows a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a second line of selected traits.

How Diversity Leaks Away

Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what is left is essentially one plant expressed across 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 surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but absent in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen plants, and a anyone trying to create something different discovers there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir can only persist as long as people grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most growers do not keep one long enough to look. For anyone making seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.

• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and branching that matches the desired female shape are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear scent indicates it holds the resin genes that are worth keeping.
• Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded outright; that trait is the one thing worth carrying into a line.
• Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen all at once are often also the less desirable genetically; breeders prefer steady producers.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The mistake new regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of growing 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 either cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: stature, flowering time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. This variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Let every male pollinate each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not refinement.
• Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and express less variation than the original pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is built.

All three require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

Some lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people maintaining them regard the population as the whole point, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be too aromas and chemistry that no longer appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above turns regular seed into the right option for everyone, and claiming that it is does the category no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who needs every one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds everything within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous plant reproduced as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left alone.

Ordering and the Law

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