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 picked up by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock 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 makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower gives up by not growing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, 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 care as the mother.
A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply shows several of those traits less because it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders 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 can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what is left is close to one plant repeated in slightly different ways.
This is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone vanish out of the population entirely. A decade of this produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to make something different discovers there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and it only persist as long as people keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong aroma indicates it holds the resin traits worth passing on.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is far more useful than an early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
- Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under normal conditions is discarded outright; that tendency is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
- Restraint. Males that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often the less selected genetically; breeders prefer moderate producers.
A Pack Is a Population
A error first-time regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of running it is to observe the spread and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, resistance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning selected parents means producing the next generation, and here the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of two specific plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
- Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It keeps the full range of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the range quickly and is useful when one plant has something worth keeping and the second brought mainly vigour.
Each of these require only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. There will be too flavours and effects that do not exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been grown out since the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above turns regular seed the right choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the category no favours.
A grower with space for three plants who wants each one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the start of flower, because a missed male in a small space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous cut repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and at some point to make something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, 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 both are allowed under licence or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.
