Half Male, Fully Worth It: Regular Seeds
Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to see 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 began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry 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 makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those traits less since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected genes.
The Narrowing
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two rounds what is left is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but absent in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something different discovers there is little left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir only exists if people grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is rare, since most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.
- Restraint. Plants that dump huge amounts of pollen early are often the least desirable in other respects; breeders favour steady producers.
- Stability. A male that also shows female pistils under normal stress is discarded without exception; that trait is the one thing worth breeding into a line.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent indicates it carries the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the intended female shape are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
Thinking in Numbers
A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the spread and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: height, finishing time, smell, density, tolerance. This spread is not a failure 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 can never supply: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.
Making Your Own Seed
Holding chosen parents means making the next batch, and there the options multiply. The main approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few chosen females, every other plant else removed. The offspring carry the qualities of two selected plants and show narrower variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to lock in a specific quality. It tightens the range quickly and is used when a single plant has something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.
Each of these need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
A number of lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat the population as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not in a small room. Expect too aromas and effects that do not appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the category no favours.
A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants 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 intends to choose, to keep and eventually to produce something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best left alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.