What Disappears When Every Seed Is Female

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer 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 at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended 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 gives up by not growing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.

Not Just Pollen

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the female.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less because it never grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a different set of selected traits.

How Diversity Leaks Away

Much of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each generation of that process halves the surviving genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is close to one plant repeated in slightly different ways.

That is fine for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear from the population entirely. A generation of this produces a market crowded with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder trying to make something new finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only exists if somebody grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

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

• Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures in step with the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
• Stability. A male that at the same time forms female pistils under normal stress is rejected outright; the trait is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Restraint. Males that release huge quantities of pollen all at once are frequently also the less selected in other respects; many breeders prefer moderate producers.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to see the spread and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable differences: height, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the choices multiply. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.

• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the range fast and is useful when a single parent has something worth keeping and the second brought mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation not refinement.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and express less variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a stable line is built.

Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the entire value, and selfing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be also aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

None of the above makes regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the product no service.

A grower with space for three plants who needs every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under local rules or neither is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.

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This post was written by Arturo