Browse 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 bought by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.
Not Just Pollen
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the female.
A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less since it never grows a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a different line of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every round of that selfing halves the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant repeated across slightly different forms.
That is fine for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to make something different finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and that reservoir only exists as long as people keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is scarce, because most growers never keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it carries the terpene genes worth passing on.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen early are frequently also the less selected in other respects; breeders favour moderate producers.
- Stability. Any male that also shows female flowers under normal conditions is rejected without exception; the tendency is the one thing worth carrying into a line.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is ready.
A Pack Is a Population
The mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of running it is to see the spread and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to compare and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of selected parents that are their own.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning chosen parents means producing the next generation, and here the options multiply. The main approaches cover most of what home breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or a few picked females, every other plant else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of two selected plants and show narrower variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a new line is built.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring again to one of its parents to lock in a specific quality. It tightens the range fast and is useful when one plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male pollinate every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not improvement.
Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people keeping them regard diversity as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not under a tent. There will be too aromas and chemistry that no longer appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of collection and the generation it has been grown out from the original collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the category no service.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to check the plants each day during the onset of flower, because a missed male in a confined space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known clone-only cut reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and at some point to make something new; for anyone else the back shelf is best ignored where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked parcels with the original packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.