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 picked up by a dwindling number of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to see that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The easy 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 selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less visibly since it does not produce a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a second set of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the surviving genetic variation, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.
That is fine for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone disappear out of the population entirely. A generation of this leaves a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to create something new finds there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it can only exists if people keep growing it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, because most people never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear scent indicates it holds the resin traits that are worth keeping.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, floppy male passes that on too.
- Restraint. Males that release huge amounts of pollen early are frequently the least desirable in other respects; breeders prefer steady shedders.
A Pack Is a Population
The error new regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances 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 range and choose 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 cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for real differences: stature, finishing time, smell, 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 the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the options open up. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the traits of the two selected plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the range quickly and is used when a single parent has something worth concentrating and the second brought mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It preserves the full range of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
All three require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people maintaining them regard diversity as the entire point, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect too flavours and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate 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.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above makes regular seed the right choice for everyone, and pretending that it is would the category no service.
A grower with space for three plants who wants each one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer 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 choose, to hold onto and at some point to produce something new; for anyone else the back shelf is safely ignored where it is.
Before You Buy
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 import is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or both is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.