Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a 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 understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower gives up by not growing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, 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 half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less because it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.
That is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool entirely. A decade of this produces a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to create something different discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir can only persist if somebody keep growing it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most people never keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that resembles the desired female shape are passed on; a lanky, floppy male hands that on too.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma suggests it carries the resin genes worth passing on.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen early are often also the less selected in other respects; breeders prefer steady producers.
- Stability. Any male that also shows female pistils under normal conditions is discarded without exception; the trait is the one thing worth carrying forward.
Thinking in Numbers
The error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing 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 value of growing it is to observe the range and select 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 cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for real variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of selected parents that are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the options open up. The main methods cover most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of two selected plants and show less spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not improvement.
- Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It tightens the range quickly and is used when a single plant has something worth keeping and the second brought mainly vigour.
Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them treat diversity as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not under a tent. There will be too aromas and chemistry that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the category no favours.
A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the start of flower, since a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only cut repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate 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 buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed 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.