Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock 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 makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The easy description 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 care as the mother.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it just shows some of those qualities less visibly because it does not grows a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a second set of selected genes.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after two generations what remains is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
That is acceptable for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A decade of this produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something new discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it can only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is scarce, since most people never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders look for.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen early are often also the least selected genetically; breeders prefer moderate producers.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that resembles the desired female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that on too.
- 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 scent indicates it holds the resin traits worth keeping.
- Stability. A male that at the same time forms female pistils under ordinary stress is discarded without exception; the trait is the one thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
The mistake new regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the range 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 discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two selected plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is made.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It tightens the range fast and is useful when one parent has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach every female. It preserves the whole 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 right approach when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
Each of these require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard diversity as the entire point, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not under a tent. There will be also aromas and effects that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above turns regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is does the category no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. The same 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 within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known clone-only cut reproduced as closely as possible is 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 make something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is best left alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both 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.