What Disappears When Every Seed Is Female

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see 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 began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because 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 never growing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a copy.

Not Just Pollen

The easy account of a male cannabis plant is « the one that makes pollen », and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same care as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less visibly because it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a different line of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what remains is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different ways.

This is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the gene pool altogether. A generation of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something different finds there is little left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and that reservoir only persist if somebody grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Guides on selecting females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, since most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it carries the resin traits worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers in step with the females is more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Restraint. Males that dump enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently also the less desirable in other respects; breeders prefer moderate producers.
• Stability. Any male that also shows female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected outright; the tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and branching that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that down too.

A Pack Is a Population

A mistake new regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the spread and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents means making the next batch, and here the options open up. The main methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the qualities of the two specific plants and express narrower spread than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is made.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling back to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the genetics quickly and is used when one plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.

All three require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. There will be also aromas and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of origin and the generation it has been reproduced since the original collection.

The Honest Exclusions

None of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the category no service.

A grower with room for three plants who needs every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a known famous 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 select, to keep and at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely left alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.