Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves 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 breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists 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 makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a copy.
The Other Half of the Genome
The easy account 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 selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less because it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different forms.
That is acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to create something new discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and it only exists as long as somebody grows it.
Reading a Male Plant
Articles on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is rare, since most people never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Stability. A male that also shows female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded without exception; that tendency is the last thing worth breeding forward.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that resembles the desired female habit are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it carries the resin genes that are worth keeping.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are frequently also the less desirable genetically; breeders favour moderate shedders.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and select from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable variation: height, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding selected parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main methods account for most of what home breeders do.
- Open pollination. Allow each male reach every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
- Backcross. Take a chosen offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a particular quality. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when one plant has something worth concentrating and the second brought mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few picked females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the traits of the two specific plants and show less variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
Each of these need 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.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not under a small room. Expect too aromas and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the product no service.
A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants each day around the start of flower, because a late male in a small space seeds everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a known clone-only plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep 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 dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.