Half Male, Fully Worth It: Regular Seeds

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by never growing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. For 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 contributes structure, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less since it does not grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line borrows and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.

The Narrowing

Much of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what remains is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different ways.

This is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone vanish out of the population entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder trying to create something different finds there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and it only exists as long as somebody keep growing it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

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

• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear aroma indicates it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• 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 any female is receptive.
• Stability. Any male that also forms female pistils under normal conditions is discarded outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
• Restraint. Males that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often the less desirable genetically; many breeders favour moderate producers.

A Pack Is a Population

The mistake first-time regular-seed growers fall into 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 running it is to see the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around 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. That 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 has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding chosen parents means producing the next generation, and there the options multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Let every male pollinate each female. It keeps the full range of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its original parents to lock in a particular quality. It narrows the range fast and is used when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of two selected plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a stable line is made.

Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard the population as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be also flavours and effects that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above turns regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the product no service.

A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a specific famous plant reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and eventually to produce something new; for anyone else the back shelf is best ignored where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.