Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought 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 see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock 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 half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.
Not Just Pollen
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene profile just as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less visibly because it never grows 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 repeat. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different line of selected genes.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every round 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.
That is acceptable for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but absent in the chosen clone vanish from the population entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market full with variations of the same few plants, and a breeder trying to create something different finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir can only exists if people keep growing it.
Reading a Male Plant
Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is scarce, since most growers do not keep one long enough to look. For a grower making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and branching that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that down too.
- Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal conditions is discarded outright; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
- 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 indicates it holds the terpene traits that are worth keeping.
A Pack Is a Population
The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample 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 evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: height, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. 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 cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the choices multiply. Three methods cover most of what home breeders do.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the qualities of two specific plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a stable line is made.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.
- Backcross. Cross a selected seedling again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It tightens the genetics quickly and is useful when one parent shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the entire value, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be too aromas and chemistry that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of origin and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the product no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the start of flower, since a late male in a small space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous 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 select, to keep and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under local rules or neither is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.