Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced 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 easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a copy.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is « a pollen source », and to a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less because it never produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different set of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every round of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed in marginally different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market full with versions of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to make something different finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only exists if people grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, because most people do not keep one long enough to judge. For a grower making seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Restraint. Males that release huge amounts of pollen all at once are often also the less selected in other respects; many breeders prefer moderate producers.
- Stability. A male that at the same time shows female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected outright; the trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma suggests it holds the resin genes worth passing on.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that on too.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A error first-time regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 chances 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 range and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable variation: height, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. This spread 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 now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding chosen parents means making the next batch, and here the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the traits of two selected plants and express less variation than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.
- Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate each female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
- Backcross. Cross a selected seedling again to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It narrows the range fast and is used when a single parent shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard the population as the entire point, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a tent. There will be too flavours and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is does the product no service.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day during the onset of flower, because a missed male in a small space seeds everything inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a known clone-only cut reproduced as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under local rules or neither is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.