The Case for the Male Plant

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace 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 case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by never seeing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.

The Other Half of the Genome

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for 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 attention as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what remains is close to one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

This is acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but absent in the selected clone vanish out of the population entirely. A decade of this leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone wanting to create something new discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it only persist as long as people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is scarce, because most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower making seed, these are the marks breeders look for.

• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and branching that resembles the desired female habit are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong scent indicates it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is more useful than an early one that sheds pollen before any female is ready.
• Stability. Any male that also shows female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; that trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
• Restraint. Males that dump enormous quantities of pollen early are often also the less selected genetically; breeders prefer steady shedders.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

A mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable differences: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and here the options open up. The main methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the traits of two selected plants and show less variation than the original pack. Done over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring back to one of its parents to lock in a specific trait. It narrows the range fast and is useful when one parent shows something worth concentrating and the second brought mostly vigour.

All three need only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the entire value, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. There will be too aromas and chemistry that no longer appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been reproduced since the first collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the category no service.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds everything 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 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 eventually to produce something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.