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 shrinking number of people who understand 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 shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by not growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of 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 which follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those traits less since it does not grows a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different line of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that process halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different ways.
This is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something different finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and that reservoir can only exists if somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, because most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal conditions is discarded outright; that trait is the last thing worth carrying into a line.
- Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen early are often also the least desirable genetically; breeders favour steady producers.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is far more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong aroma indicates it holds the resin genes worth keeping.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and branching that matches the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A error new regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. 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 yields around five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable differences: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents that are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.
- Backcross. Cross a selected seedling again to one of its parents to fix a specific trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when a single plant shows something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Allow each male reach every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation not refinement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the traits of two specific plants and show less variation than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
All three need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people maintaining them regard diversity as the entire value, and selfing a single clone 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 wide variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect also flavours and effects that do not appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated 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.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above makes regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is does the product no service.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants each day around the start of flower, since a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a specific clone-only cut reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best ignored where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked parcels with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.