The Case for the Male Plant

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 next to it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never growing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a copy.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to 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 contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply shows some of those traits less visibly since it never produce a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected genes.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each generation of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed across slightly different ways.

This is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to make something different discovers there is little left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it only persist as long as somebody grows it.

How to Judge a Male

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

• Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
• Restraint. Males that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are frequently the least selected genetically; many breeders prefer moderate producers.
• Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; that tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, floppy male hands that down too.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it holds the terpene traits that are worth keeping.

Thinking in Numbers

The error first-time regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value 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 something like five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real differences: height, finishing time, smell, density, tolerance. 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 cannot offer: a pair of selected parents that are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding chosen parents means producing the next batch, and there the choices open up. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its parents to fix a specific trait. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when one plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the qualities of two selected plants and express less variation than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation not improvement.

All three require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old crosses 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 clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not under a small room. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

None of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is does the product no favours.

A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to check the plants each day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space ruins everything inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a known clone-only plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is best left alone.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply 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 permitted under local rules or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.