Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace 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 contributes, what a grower gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those traits less visibly since it does not grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a different line of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that process halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant repeated in slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but absent in the selected clone vanish out of the population altogether. A generation of this leaves a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to create something different finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and that reservoir can only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, because most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen early are often also the least selected genetically; many breeders prefer moderate producers.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear scent indicates it carries the terpene traits that are worth keeping.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
- Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary conditions is rejected without exception; that trait is the one thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
Thinking in Numbers
The mistake new regular-seed growers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts 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 running it is to see the range and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for real variation: stature, flowering time, smell, density, tolerance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding selected parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and there the choices multiply. Three approaches cover most of what home breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a large quantity 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 rather than improvement.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It tightens the range quickly and is used when one plant has something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of two specific plants and show less variation than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard the population as the whole point, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be too aromas and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
Nothing of the above turns regular seed the best option for everyone, and pretending that it is would the product no service.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone unable to check the plants every day during the start of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds everything within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous cut reproduced as closely as possible 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 eventually to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is best left alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging 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 buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.
