Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a grower gives up by not seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply shows some of those qualities less since it never grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a second set of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant expressed in marginally different forms.
That is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A decade of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone trying to make something different finds there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir only persist as long as people grows it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, since most people never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded outright; the tendency is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong aroma suggests it holds the resin genes worth keeping.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the intended female shape are inherited; a lanky, floppy male passes that on too.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen early are often the less desirable in other respects; breeders favour steady producers.
A Pack Is a Population
A error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the range and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, smell, density, tolerance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding selected parents means making the next generation, and here the choices open up. Three approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, every other plant else removed. The offspring carry the qualities of the two selected plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
- Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the range fast and is useful when one plant shows something worth keeping and the other contributed mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not refinement.
Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be too flavours and effects that no longer appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been reproduced from the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
Nothing of the above turns regular seed the right option for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the product no service.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only cut repeated as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the back shelf is safely left alone.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.