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 beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read 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 expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended 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 not growing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.
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 the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less since it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what remains is essentially one plant repeated across slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to make something new finds there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and it can only exists as long as people keep growing it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is scarce, since most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.
- Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; that tendency is the one thing worth carrying forward.
- Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen early are frequently also the less desirable in other respects; breeders prefer moderate producers.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, floppy 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 flower parts and a clear aroma indicates it carries the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
The error new regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the spread and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for real variation: stature, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. 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 now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the choices multiply. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the traits of two specific plants and express less variation than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring again to one of its parents to fix a specific trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Allow every male reach each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard diversity as the entire point, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be too flavours 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 marked with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed the best choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the product no favours.
A grower with room for three plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds everything inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known clone-only cut repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.