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, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, 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 going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

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

A male contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it simply shows several of those qualities less since it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what remains is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.

That is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone vanish from the population entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone trying to make something different finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and that reservoir only exists as long as somebody keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is scarce, since most people never keep one long enough to look. For anyone making seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.

• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than an early one that sheds pollen before the female is ready.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong scent suggests it holds the resin traits that are worth passing on.
• Restraint. Plants that dump huge amounts of pollen all at once are often the least desirable in other respects; many breeders prefer steady shedders.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that resembles the desired female habit are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal stress is discarded without exception; that trait is the last thing anyone wants breeding forward.

Thinking in Numbers

The mistake new regular-seed buyers 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 sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: stature, finishing time, smell, density, resistance. This spread is not a failure 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 offer: a pair of selected parents that are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the options open up. Three methods account for most of what home breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds inherit the qualities of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a specific trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when one plant has something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.

All three need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production does.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard diversity as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be too aromas and chemistry that no longer appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the category no service.

A grower with room for three plants who wants each one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known clone-only cut 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 intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to make something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.