The Case for the Male Plant

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling 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 see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists 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 one plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by not growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.

Not Just Pollen

The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the female.

A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those traits less because it does not produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not give a different line of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that process halves the surviving genetic variation, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant repeated in marginally different forms.

This is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the selected clone disappear out of the population entirely. A generation of this produces a market crowded with variations of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to make something new finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir only persist if somebody keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on picking males is scarce, because most people never keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders look for.

• Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often the less selected in other respects; breeders favour moderate producers.
• Stability. A male that at the same time forms female pistils under normal stress is rejected without exception; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding forward.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong aroma suggests it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.

A Pack Is a Population

The mistake 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 real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable variation: height, flowering time, aroma, density, resistance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding chosen parents means producing the next generation, and there the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, every other plant else culled. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and express less variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the genetics fast and is used when one parent shows something worth concentrating and the second brought mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate each female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.

All three need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

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 was grown for centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people keeping them treat the population as the whole value, and selfing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect too aromas and effects that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been grown out from the first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above turns regular seed the right option for everyone, and pretending that it is does the category no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who wants every one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants each day around the onset of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a specific clone-only plant reproduced as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is best ignored where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies 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 responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.