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, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because someone held onto 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 meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a copy.

Not Just Pollen

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is «the one that makes pollen», and for a flower grower that is all it. For 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 growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less because it does not grows a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross borrows and can never replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what is left is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different forms.

That is fine for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone disappear out of the population altogether. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to create something different discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.

• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
• Restraint. Males that dump enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently also the less desirable in other respects; many breeders favour moderate shedders.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded outright; that tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early 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.

A Pack Is a Population

The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers 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 sample of a population, and the value of running it is to observe the range and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the options multiply. The main approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and involves 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.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of two specific plants and express less variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is built.
• Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the range quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.

Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard diversity as the entire point, and selfing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be too flavours and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above makes regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the category no favours.

A grower with room for three plants who needs every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, because a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous cut repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and eventually to produce something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables 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.