Regular Seeds and the Half That Gets Thrown Away

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by not growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.

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 all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply shows some of those traits less visibly since it does not produce a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not give a second line of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

This is acceptable for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone vanish out of the population entirely. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with versions of the same few plants, and a breeder trying to make something new finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir only exists as long as people keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on selecting females are everywhere; advice 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 signs breeders watch for.

• Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures in step with the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are passed on; a lanky, floppy male hands that down too.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong scent indicates it carries the terpene traits that are worth keeping.

Thinking in Numbers

The mistake new regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to see the spread and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning selected parents means producing the next generation, and here the options multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the traits of the two selected plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
• Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It keeps the whole range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its parents to lock in a specific trait. It tightens the range quickly and is used when a single plant shows something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.

Each of these require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a small room. There will be too aromas and effects that no longer appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been grown out from the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the product no favours.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and eventually to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain parcels with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.