Browse 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 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 expands. Every feminized line began 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 because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by never growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a copy.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, 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 that half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses several of those qualities less because it never grows a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a different line of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what is left is close to one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
This is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something different finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir can only persist as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is rare, since most people never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.
- Restraint. Plants that release huge amounts of pollen all at once are frequently also the least selected genetically; many breeders prefer moderate producers.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong aroma suggests it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
- Stability. A male that also shows female pistils under ordinary conditions is discarded without exception; that tendency is the last thing worth carrying forward.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers in step with the females is more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the range and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable differences: stature, finishing time, smell, bud structure, 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 the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents which are their own.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and here the options open up. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several picked females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of two specific plants and express less spread 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 each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation not refinement.
- Backcross. Cross a selected offspring back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It tightens the range fast and is useful when a single parent has something worth concentrating and the second brought mainly vigour.
All three require only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
A number of lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them treat diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be also aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above makes regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is would the category no favours.
A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds everything within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific clone-only plant reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.