Regular Seeds and the Half That Gets Thrown Away

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by never seeing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy 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 mother.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those traits less visibly because it never grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different line of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what remains is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different ways.

That is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool altogether. A decade of this leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to make something new discovers there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and it only persist as long as people grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, because most people never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.

• Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear aroma suggests it carries the terpene traits that are worth keeping.
• Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under normal conditions is discarded outright; that tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
• Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are frequently also the least selected in other respects; breeders favour moderate shedders.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The mistake first-time regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess 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 takes cuttings from the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of chosen parents which are their own.

From One Pack to the Next

Owning chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and here the options open up. The main methods account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It preserves the full range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the traits of two specific plants and show less variation than the original pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to lock in a specific trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when a single parent has something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.

All three need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat diversity as the whole point, and selfing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect too flavours and chemistry that no longer exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the original collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the category no favours.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, because a late male in a small space ruins everything within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous cut reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.