What Disappears When Every Seed Is Female

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.

Not Just Pollen

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

A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less visibly since it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line inherits and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a different set of selected traits.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that process halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated across marginally different ways.

That is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the chosen clone disappear out of the gene pool entirely. A decade of this leaves a market full with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to create something new discovers 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 persist as long as people grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is scarce, because most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.

• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear scent suggests it holds the resin genes worth keeping.
• Restraint. Plants that release huge amounts of pollen all at once are often the less selected in other respects; breeders favour moderate producers.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
• Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under normal conditions is discarded outright; the tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and branching that matches the desired female habit are inherited; a lanky, floppy male passes that on too.

A Pack Is a Population

A error new regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of running it is to see the range and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for real variation: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the options open up. Three approaches account for most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when one plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the traits of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Let every male reach every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not refinement.

Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them treat diversity as the whole value, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. There will be also flavours and chemistry that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. 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.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above turns regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds everything within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a specific clone-only cut 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 at some point to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely left alone.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or both is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.