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 dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because 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 never seeing one, and how to get value with a population rather than a copy.
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. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is selected with the same care as the female.
A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less since it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected genes.
The Narrowing
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each round of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different ways.
This is acceptable for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to make something different discovers there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it only persist as long as people keep growing it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on picking males is scarce, because most people never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male hands that down too.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female flowers under normal conditions is rejected without exception; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it carries the terpene genes worth keeping.
- Restraint. Plants that dump huge quantities of pollen all at once are frequently the less desirable genetically; many breeders favour steady producers.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is far more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
Thinking in Numbers
A error new regular-seed growers make is treating 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 point of growing it is to see the spread 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, finishing time, aroma, 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 male now owns something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents which are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the options multiply. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the other brought mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let every male pollinate each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few picked females, every other plant else culled. The offspring inherit the qualities of two selected plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
Each of these require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them regard the population as the whole point, and reversing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect also aromas and effects that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds 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 from the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above turns regular seed the best option for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the product no service.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins everything inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a known famous cut reproduced 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 of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.
