Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since 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 contributes, what a buyer loses by never seeing one, and how to get value with a population rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy 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 which follows, and that half is selected with the same care as the female.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less since it does not produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not give a second line of selected genes.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what remains is essentially one plant repeated across slightly different ways.
That is fine for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder trying to make something new discovers there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it only persist if people keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is rare, because most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it carries the terpene genes worth passing on.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, floppy male passes that down too.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently the less desirable genetically; many breeders favour moderate producers.
Thinking in Numbers
A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating 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 range and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable variation: height, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to lock in a specific trait. It tightens the range fast and is used when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male pollinate every female. It keeps the full range of the line, produces a large 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 improvement.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the traits of the two selected plants and show narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
All three need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be also flavours and effects that no longer appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the category no service.
A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a known clone-only plant repeated as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply 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 permitted under local rules or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.
