Why Breeders Still Buy Regular Seeds

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to see 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 started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by never growing one, and how to work with a population instead of a copy.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is « the one that makes pollen », and to a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less since it does not produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what remains is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different ways.

That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear out of the population entirely. A generation of this leaves a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a anyone wanting to create something different discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only persist as long as somebody grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, because most growers do not keep one long enough to look. For a grower making seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.

• Stability. A male that also forms female pistils under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; the trait is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and branching that resembles the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Restraint. Males that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often also the less selected genetically; breeders favour steady producers.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent indicates it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers in step with the females is far more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is ready.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. That 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 supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and here the choices open up. The main methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when one parent has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the traits of the two specific plants and express narrower spread than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is made.
• Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.

Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard diversity as the whole point, and reversing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. Expect too flavours and effects that no longer appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been grown out since the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the right option for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no service.

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 check the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a specific famous cut reproduced 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 make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.