Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is «the one that makes pollen», and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected genes.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every round of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different forms.
That is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but not in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market full with variations of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to make something new discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and it only exists if people grows it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is rare, since most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
- Stability. A male that also forms female pistils under ordinary stress is discarded without exception; that tendency is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong aroma indicates it holds the terpene traits worth passing on.
- Restraint. Males that release huge quantities of pollen early are frequently the less selected in other respects; many breeders prefer moderate shedders.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that resembles the intended female shape are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
A Pack Is a Population
A error new regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances 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 value of running it is to see the spread 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 cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of chosen parents that are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Holding chosen parents means making the next batch, and here the choices multiply. Three approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the range fast and is useful when a single plant shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or a few chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the traits of the two selected plants and express less variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is built.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It keeps the full range of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the correct approach 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 treatment that feminized production does.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people keeping them treat diversity as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect also flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and pretending that it is would the product no service.
A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to check the plants each day during the onset of flower, because a late male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a specific famous plant reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or neither is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.