The Case for the Male Plant

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace 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 argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a copy.

The Other Half of the Genome

The lazy 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 chosen with the same attention as the female.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it simply shows several of those qualities less since it never produce a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every generation of that selfing halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what is left is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different ways.

That is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A decade of this leaves a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a anyone wanting to create something different finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it only persist as long as somebody grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently the less desirable in other respects; many breeders favour moderate shedders.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it carries the resin traits worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.

A Pack Is a Population

A error new regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the spread and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: stature, finishing time, smell, density, tolerance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents which are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding selected parents means making the next batch, and there the choices multiply. The main approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the traits of two specific plants and express narrower spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its parents to lock in a specific quality. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when a single parent has something worth concentrating and the second brought mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.

Each of these require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people keeping them regard the population as the entire point, and reversing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a tent. Expect also flavours and effects that no longer exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of origin and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the category no service.

A grower with space for three plants who needs every one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a known famous 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 anyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain parcels with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or neither is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.