Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy 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 feminized 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 survives only because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the mother.
A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just shows some of those qualities less because it never produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not give a second set of selected traits.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is close to one plant repeated across marginally different ways.
That is fine for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear from the population entirely. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to make something different discovers there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir only persist as long as somebody grows it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, because most growers do not keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the desired female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
- Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded outright; the tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently the less desirable in other respects; breeders favour moderate producers.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
Thinking in Numbers
The error first-time regular-seed buyers make is seeing 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 see the spread 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, smell, bud structure, resistance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents which are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning chosen parents means making the next batch, and here the options open up. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Open pollination. Let each male pollinate each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not refinement.
- Backcross. Take a selected offspring back to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when a single plant has something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else culled. The offspring carry the qualities of two specific plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is built.
All three need only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
A number of lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the whole value, and reversing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. Expect also aromas and effects that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above makes regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is would the product no service.
A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific clone-only plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely ignored alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply 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 both is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.