Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who know 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 shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by not seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a copy.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy account 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 which follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male contributes growth habit, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses some of those traits less since it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected traits.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each generation of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is close to one plant repeated across marginally different ways.
This is acceptable for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of this leaves a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone trying to make something new finds there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it can only exists as long as somebody grows it.
Reading a Male Plant
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, because most growers never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen all at once are frequently the least desirable in other respects; breeders favour steady shedders.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that matches the desired female shape are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures in step with the females is more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
- Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under normal stress is discarded outright; that trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
A Pack Is a Population
The mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to see the range and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of chosen parents which are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning selected parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the options multiply. The main methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several picked females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two selected plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the other contributed mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate each female. It keeps the full range of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.
Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them regard the population as the entire point, and selfing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. There will be too flavours and chemistry that no longer exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of origin and the generation it has been grown out since the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the product no favours.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to check the plants every day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space ruins everything inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous 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 keep and at some point to produce something new; for anyone else the back shelf is best left alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain 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 differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or both is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.