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 picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by never growing one, and how to get value with a population rather than a clone.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to 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 contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply shows several of those qualities less because it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a different set of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.
This is acceptable for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of this leaves a market full with variations of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir only persist if people grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, since most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal stress is rejected without exception; the trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen all at once are frequently also the least selected in other respects; breeders prefer steady producers.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong aroma indicates it holds the terpene traits worth passing on.
Thinking in Numbers
A error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the range and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for real differences: stature, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.
Making Your Own Seed
Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the choices multiply. Three methods cover most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, every other plant else removed. The seeds carry the qualities of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Open pollination. Let every male pollinate each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the range quickly and is used when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.
All three require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
A number of lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the whole point, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. There will be also flavours and chemistry that no longer exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is does the category no favours.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the start of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known famous cut repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or neither is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.