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, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only 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 intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by never growing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a copy.

Not Just Pollen

The lazy description 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 which follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just shows some of those qualities less since it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross inherits and cannot repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is close to one plant repeated across 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: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of the same few plants, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is little left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir only persist if people grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is rare, because most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone making seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.

• Stability. Any male that also shows female flowers under normal conditions is rejected without exception; that trait is the one thing worth breeding into a line.
• Restraint. Males that dump enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently the least desirable in other respects; breeders prefer steady shedders.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong scent indicates it holds the terpene traits worth passing on.

A Pack Is a Population

A mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable differences: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That variation 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 has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of selected parents which are their own.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding chosen parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and there the choices open up. The main approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its original parents to lock in a specific quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when one parent shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of the two selected plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
• Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation not refinement.

Each of these need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat diversity as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be too aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is does the category no service.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known clone-only plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is best left alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or both is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.