Regular Seeds and the Plants Nobody Keeps

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line began 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 held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace 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 unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower gives up by not seeing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what is left is close to one plant expressed in marginally different forms.

That is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone vanish from the gene pool entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to create something different finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir can only exists if people keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Guides on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is scarce, since most growers never keep one long enough to judge. For anyone producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.

• Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is far more useful than an early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong scent suggests it holds the terpene traits that are worth passing on.
• Restraint. Plants that release huge amounts of pollen early are often also the less selected in other respects; breeders prefer steady shedders.
• Stability. A male that also shows female pistils under ordinary stress is discarded without exception; that trait is the one thing worth breeding into a line.

Thinking in Numbers

A error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the range and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect real variation: stature, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. 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 theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and there the options multiply. The main methods cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the range quickly and is useful when a single parent has something worth keeping and the second brought mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring carry the qualities of two specific plants and show less variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a stable line is made.

Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders keeping them treat diversity as the whole point, and reversing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be too aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is does the product no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space ruins everything inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only cut reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and at some point to make something new; for anyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or both is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.