Regular Seeds and the Half That Gets Thrown Away

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended 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 get value with a population instead of a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

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 that follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the female.

A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second line of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different ways.

That is acceptable for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A decade of this produces a market crowded with variations of the same few plants, and a anyone wanting to make something different finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and that reservoir can only persist as long as people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is rare, because most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.

• Restraint. Plants that dump huge quantities of pollen all at once are often the less desirable in other respects; breeders prefer moderate producers.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers in step with the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
• Stability. A male that at the same time shows female flowers under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; the trait is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong aroma suggests it carries the resin traits worth keeping.

A Pack Is a Population

A error new regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real variation: height, flowering time, aroma, density, resistance. That variation is not a failure 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 pair of chosen parents which are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding chosen parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and there the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Let each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation not refinement.
• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few chosen females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of two selected plants and express less variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a new line is built.

All three require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

Some lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the whole point, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. There will be also aromas and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate 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 first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the product no favours.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space ruins everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a specific famous plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and eventually to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.

Practicalities

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 differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or neither is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer's job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.