The Case for the Male Plant

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling number of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back 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 unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by not seeing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

The lazy account 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 which follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those traits less because it does not produce a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after two rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed across marginally different forms.

This is fine for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone disappear out of the population entirely. A generation of this produces a market full with variations of the same few plants, and a breeder wanting to make something different discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and that reservoir can only persist if somebody keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, since most people never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Restraint. Plants that release huge amounts of pollen early are frequently also the least selected in other respects; breeders favour steady shedders.
• Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected outright; that tendency is the last thing worth breeding forward.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that resembles the desired female habit are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers in step with the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.

A Pack Is a Population

A error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of running it is to see the spread and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for real variation: stature, finishing time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Owning selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and here the choices multiply. Three methods cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Let every male pollinate each female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the traits of the two selected plants and show less spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is made.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring back to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the range fast and is used when one plant has something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.

All three require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them treat diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. There will be too flavours and chemistry that do not appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and pretending that it is would the product no favours.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone unable to inspect the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only plant repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and at some point to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.