Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line began 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 exists only because somebody 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 single plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by not growing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a clone.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of 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 mother.
A male passes on structure, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less since it never produce 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 give a different line of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated across marginally different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market full with versions of the same few plants, and a breeder wanting to make something new finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir can only exists as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is rare, because most people do not keep one long enough to look. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
- Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen early are often also the least desirable genetically; breeders prefer moderate shedders.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear aroma suggests it holds the resin genes that are worth passing on.
- Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal conditions is rejected outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
A Pack Is a Population
A mistake new regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of running it is to see the range and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of selected parents which are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and here the choices open up. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Open pollination. Let every male reach every female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two selected plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable choices, this is how a stable line is built.
- Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the range fast and is used when a single plant shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them treat the population as the entire point, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be too flavours and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is does the product no service.
A grower with space for three plants who needs every one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to inspect the plants each day during the start of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a known famous plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely ignored alone.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.
