Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
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 that follows, and that half is selected with the same care as the female.
A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less visibly because it never grows a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a different line of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every generation of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed in slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone vanish out of the population entirely. A decade of this produces a market crowded with versions of the same few plants, and a anyone wanting to make something new finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and it only exists as long as somebody grows it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is scarce, because most people never keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Restraint. Males that release huge quantities of pollen early are frequently the least desirable in other respects; breeders favour moderate shedders.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong scent indicates it holds the terpene genes worth passing on.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, floppy male hands that down too.
- Stability. A male that also forms female pistils under normal stress is discarded outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
A Pack Is a Population
A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. 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.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, resistance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning selected parents means making the next generation, and here the options open up. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or several picked females, every other plant else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of the two specific plants and express narrower spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
- Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It tightens the genetics quickly and is used when a single plant shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat the population as the entire point, and reversing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not in a small room. Expect also aromas and effects that do not exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the category no favours.
A grower with space for three plants who needs every one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous plant 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 keep and at some point to make something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left alone.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or neither is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.
