Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because somebody kept 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 meant 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 get value with a population rather than a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is «a pollen source», 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 that half is chosen with the same care as the female.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just shows some of those traits less visibly because it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is essentially one plant repeated across marginally different forms.
That is fine for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool entirely. A decade of this produces a market full with versions of the same few plants, and a anyone trying to create something new discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it can only exists as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, because most people do not keep one long enough to look. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong aroma suggests it carries the terpene genes worth keeping.
- Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under ordinary conditions is discarded without exception; that trait is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
- Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen early are often the least selected genetically; breeders prefer steady shedders.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the intended female habit are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
A Pack Is a Population
The error first-time regular-seed growers make 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 sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the range and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around 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 variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. 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
Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main approaches cover most of what home breeders do.
- Open pollination. Let every male pollinate each female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and show narrower spread than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.
Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people keeping them treat the population as the whole point, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. There will be too flavours and effects that do not appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been reproduced since the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is does the category no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to check the plants each day around the start of flower, since a missed male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a specific famous cut reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables 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 job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.