Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read 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, every new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, 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, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for a flower grower that is all it. To 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 contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it just shows some of those qualities less visibly because it never grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what is left is close to one plant repeated across slightly different forms.
That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone vanish from the population altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of the same few plants, and a anyone trying to create something new finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and it only exists as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on selecting females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is rare, since most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Stability. A male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal stress is rejected without exception; that tendency is the last thing worth breeding forward.
- Restraint. Males that release huge quantities of pollen early are frequently the least selected in other respects; breeders favour steady producers.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are passed on; a stretched, floppy male hands that down too.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers in step with the females is more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong aroma indicates it holds the terpene genes that are worth passing on.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A error 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 real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to see the spread and select from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: height, flowering time, aroma, density, resistance. This variation is not a failure 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 supply: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning selected parents means making the next batch, and here the options multiply. The main approaches cover most of what home breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or several picked females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and express narrower variation than the original pack. Done over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
- Backcross. Cross a selected seedling again to one of its original parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the genetics quickly and is used when one parent has something worth keeping and the other contributed mostly vigour.
All three require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be also flavours and effects that do not exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and claiming that it is does the product no favours.
A grower with space for three plants who needs every one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a specific clone-only cut reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.
Practicalities
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, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely 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 allowed under licence or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.