Half Male, Fully Worth It: Regular Seeds

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by never growing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a copy.

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 half is selected with the same care as the female.

A male passes on structure, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just shows some of those traits less because it never grows a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

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

This is acceptable for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the selected 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 create something new finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it only exists as long as people grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, since most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.

• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that matches the desired female habit are inherited; a lanky, floppy male hands that on too.
• Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently also the least selected in other respects; breeders favour steady shedders.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong aroma indicates it carries the resin traits worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Stability. A male that also forms female pistils under normal stress is discarded without exception; the trait is the one thing anyone wants carrying forward.

A Pack Is a Population

The mistake new regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the range and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect real differences: stature, flowering time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of selected parents that are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Owning selected parents means producing the next generation, and there the options open up. The main methods cover most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few chosen females, every other plant else removed. The seeds carry the qualities of the two specific plants and express narrower variation than the original pack. Repeated over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
• Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to lock in a specific quality. It narrows the range quickly and is used when a single parent has something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow each male reach every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.

Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat diversity as the whole point, and selfing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be also 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 origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first 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 does the product no service.

A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to check the plants every day around the start of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known clone-only plant repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.