The Case for the Male Plant

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves 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 survives at all exists only because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a pack 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 all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is chosen with the same care as the mother.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it just expresses some of those qualities less visibly because it never produce a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant repeated across slightly different forms.

That is acceptable for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen plants, and a anyone trying to make something new finds there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only exists as long as somebody keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, because most growers never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.

• Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures in step with the females is far more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal conditions is rejected without exception; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong scent suggests it holds the terpene traits worth passing on.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that resembles the desired female shape are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
• Restraint. Plants that dump huge quantities of pollen early are often also the least desirable genetically; breeders favour moderate shedders.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

A error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to see the range and choose from it.

About 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 assess for breeding. Within the females, expect 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 keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of selected parents that are their own.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding chosen parents means producing the next generation, and there the choices multiply. The main methods cover most of what home breeders do.

• Open pollination. Allow each male reach every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a specific trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when a single parent has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the traits of two selected plants and show less variation than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.

Each of these need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None 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 gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a tent. Expect too flavours and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of origin and the generation it has been grown out since the first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

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

A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous cut repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.