Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to work with a population rather than 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. For 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 contributes structure, vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less because it never produce a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different line of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after two rounds what is left is close to one plant repeated in slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A generation of this produces a market full with versions of a dozen clones, 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 replenishes the pool, and it only exists as long as somebody keep growing it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are easy to find; advice on picking males is scarce, since most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone making seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and branching that resembles the desired female shape are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before the female is ready.
- 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 aroma indicates it carries the terpene traits worth keeping.
- Restraint. Males that release huge quantities of pollen all at once are frequently the less desirable genetically; breeders prefer steady producers.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A mistake new regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to compare and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, smell, density, tolerance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.
Making Your Own Seed
Holding chosen parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and here the options open up. The main approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Open pollination. Allow every male reach each female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It narrows the range fast and is useful when a single parent shows something worth concentrating and the second brought mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few chosen females, every other plant else removed. The seeds inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and show narrower variation than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people keeping them treat the population as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect too flavours and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the product no service.
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 anyone unable to check the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous cut 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 eventually to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely left alone.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.