Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by never growing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same care as the mother.
A male contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply shows several of those traits less since it never produce a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected genes.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is close to one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
This is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of this leaves a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder trying to create something new finds there is little left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir can only exists if somebody keep growing it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most growers do not keep one long enough to look. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Stability. Any male that also shows female pistils under normal conditions is discarded without exception; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding forward.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures in step with the females is more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Restraint. Plants that dump huge amounts of pollen all at once are frequently the least desirable in other respects; breeders prefer moderate shedders.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A mistake new regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of running it is to observe 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 evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: height, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of selected parents that are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Holding selected parents means producing the next generation, and there the options open up. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the range fast and is used when a single parent has something worth keeping and the other brought mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let every male pollinate each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring carry the traits of two selected plants and show narrower spread than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people keeping them treat diversity as the entire point, and reversing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a small room. Expect also aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its region of origin and the generation it has been grown out from the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the best option for everyone, and pretending that it is does the product no service.
A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a known clone-only cut reproduced as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and eventually to produce something of their own; for everyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in plain parcels with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or both is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.