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 picked up by a dwindling number of people who know 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 losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by not seeing one, and how to get value with a population rather than a copy.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy account 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 that half is selected with the same care as the mother.

A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less visibly since it never produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a second set of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what is left is close to one plant repeated across marginally different forms.

That is acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but absent in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of this produces a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder trying to make something new discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and it can only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower making seed, these are the signs breeders look for.

• Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, floppy male hands that down too.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear aroma indicates it carries the terpene traits that are worth passing on.
• Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded without exception; that trait is the one thing worth carrying forward.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The mistake new regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine 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 around five females to evaluate and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable variation: stature, finishing time, smell, density, tolerance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of chosen parents which are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents means making the next generation, and here the choices multiply. The main methods account for most of what home breeders attempt.

• Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.

All three need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people keeping them treat the population as the whole value, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. Expect also aromas and effects that no longer exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above makes 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 wants each one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a small space ruins everything inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known clone-only plant reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely left alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.