Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked 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 see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is «a pollen source», 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 chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it just shows some of those traits less visibly because it does not grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the population entirely. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to create something new discovers there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir only exists if somebody keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is rare, since most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers in step with the females is far more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is ready.
- Restraint. Plants that release huge quantities of pollen early are frequently the least desirable in other respects; breeders favour moderate producers.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal stress is rejected outright; the tendency is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that resembles the desired female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that down too.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it holds the terpene genes that are worth passing on.
Thinking in Numbers
A mistake new regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real 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 yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, 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 the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of chosen parents which are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Holding chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and here the options open up. The main approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the range quickly and is used when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, every other plant else removed. The seeds inherit the qualities of the two selected plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with consistent selection, this is how a new line is built.
- Open pollination. Let each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
All three require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the whole point, and selfing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not under a tent. There will be too flavours and effects that do not appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants each day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a confined space seeds everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous plant reproduced as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and at some point to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely ignored where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful 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 nothing of this article is legal advice.