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 next to it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line started 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 because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by not growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less visibly because it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
That is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to make something different discovers there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir only persist if somebody keep growing it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, since most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone making seed, these are the marks breeders look for.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong scent suggests it holds the resin genes worth keeping.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that resembles the intended female habit are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal conditions is rejected outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding forward.
Thinking in Numbers
The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to see the range and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding selected parents means producing the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of two specific plants and show less spread than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its parents to lock in a particular quality. It tightens the range fast and is used when one plant has something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production does.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
A number of lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people maintaining them treat diversity as the whole point, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. Expect too flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of origin and the generation it has been grown out since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the category no favours.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to check the plants each day around the start of flower, because a late male in a small space seeds everything inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific clone-only plant repeated as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and at some point to make something of their own; for everyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places owning 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 job, and no part of this article is legal advice.