Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a shrinking group 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 paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by not seeing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less visibly because it does not grows a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a second set of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed across marginally different forms.
This is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits 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 produces a market crowded with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to make something different discovers there is little left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only exists if somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is rare, because most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under normal stress is discarded outright; the trait is the one thing worth breeding into a line.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent indicates it carries the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers in step with the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen early are often the least selected genetically; many breeders prefer steady producers.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
A Pack Is a Population
A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing 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 value of running it is to observe the range and select from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable differences: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and here the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its parents to lock in a particular quality. It tightens the genetics fast and is useful when one plant has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not refinement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the traits of the two selected plants and express narrower variation than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is built.
All three need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard the population as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. Expect also aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection 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 the right option for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no service.
A grower with space for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants each day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a small space seeds everything inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a known 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 choose, to keep and eventually to produce 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 packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation 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 the two are permitted under licence or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.