Regular Seeds: Cannabis’s Genetic Library

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking number of people who know 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 losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone 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 contributes, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a copy.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male passes on structure, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those traits less since it does not produce a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a different set of selected traits.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every round of that process halves the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant repeated across marginally different ways.

That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool altogether. A decade of this leaves a market crowded with versions of a dozen plants, and a breeder trying to create something different discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it can only persist if somebody grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, because most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.

• Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often the less desirable in other respects; breeders favour steady shedders.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear scent suggests it carries the resin traits worth passing on.
• Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers in step with the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
• Stability. Any male that also shows female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded without exception; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and branching that matches the desired female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.

Thinking in Numbers

A error first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real differences: height, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of chosen parents that are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning selected parents means making the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, everything else removed. The offspring carry the traits of two specific plants and show narrower variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is built.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when a single plant shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a generous 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 aim is preservation not improvement.

All three require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard diversity as the whole point, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect also flavours and chemistry that do not exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been grown out from the first collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the category no favours.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a small space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a specific famous cut reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and eventually to make something new; for anyone else the back shelf is best ignored alone.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or neither is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.

ronniedey

I and my team research various ad networks and can help you increase your overall ad revenue; so you could rake in more greenbacks with the best monetization platforms. Tap into the power of the online publishing business with me. I am just a mail away, so reach out to me if you want to scale up your website revenue. mail: [email protected]