The Case for the Male Plant

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not growing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.

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 all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is chosen with the same care as the female.

A male contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply shows some of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a different line of selected traits.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what remains is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different forms.

That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding produces a market full with variations of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to make something new discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it can only exists if people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, since most people do not keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently also the least selected in other respects; breeders prefer moderate shedders.
• Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and branching that resembles the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under ordinary conditions is discarded outright; the trait is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear scent indicates it carries the resin genes worth passing on.

A Pack Is a Population

A error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding chosen parents means making the next batch, and there the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when one parent shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of two specific plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.

Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard the population as the entire point, and reversing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be also aromas and chemistry that no longer exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out from the original collection.

The Honest Exclusions

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

A grower with space for three plants who needs each 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 onset of flower, because a missed male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous cut repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to produce something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best ignored where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked packaging with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or both is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.