Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold 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 unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by not seeing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is «a pollen source», and for a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the female.
A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less because it never grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different line of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market full with versions of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it only persist if somebody keep growing it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, because most people do not keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female pistils under ordinary stress is discarded without exception; the tendency is the one thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
- Restraint. Males that dump huge quantities of pollen all at once are often also the least desirable in other respects; breeders prefer moderate producers.
A Pack Is a Population
A error new regular-seed growers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the spread and choose 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 either discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect real variation: stature, flowering 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 strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents that are theirs.
Making Your Own Seed
Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the options open up. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few chosen females, every other plant else culled. The seeds inherit the traits of the two specific plants and show less variation than the original pack. Done over generations with consistent choices, this is how a new line is built.
- Backcross. Cross a selected seedling again to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It tightens the range fast and is useful when a single parent has something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.
All three need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market at all. 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 reproduced from the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above makes regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the product no favours.
A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants each day around the start of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins everything within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a known famous plant reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.