Why Breeders Still Buy Regular Seeds

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling number 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 expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, 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 to a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same care as the mother.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less visibly because it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a second set of selected traits.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what is left is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.

That is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder trying to create something different finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir only exists as long as somebody grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, because most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.

• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that matches the intended female shape are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Stability. A male that also forms female pistils under ordinary conditions is rejected without exception; that trait is the one thing worth carrying forward.
• Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear aroma suggests it carries the resin genes that are worth keeping.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

A mistake first-time regular-seed growers fall into 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 running it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable differences: stature, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and here the options multiply. Three methods cover most of what home breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It tightens the genetics fast and is useful when one parent has something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two selected plants and express less spread 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 paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not in a tent. Expect also flavours and chemistry that no longer exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region 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 makes regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the product no service.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone unable to inspect the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins everything within days. A person running 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 better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is safely ignored where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s 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 a good number of places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.