Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper 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 read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by never seeing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
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 which follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less since it never grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected traits.
The Narrowing
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what is left is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the population altogether. A generation of this leaves a market full with variations of a dozen plants, and a breeder trying to make something new discovers there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it only exists if people grows it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on selecting females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, because most people never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that matches the desired female shape are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong aroma indicates it carries the resin genes that are worth passing on.
- Restraint. Plants that release huge amounts of pollen all at once are often the least selected in other respects; breeders prefer steady producers.
- Stability. A male that at the same time shows female flowers under ordinary conditions is rejected without exception; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
Thinking in Numbers
A mistake 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 running it is to observe the spread and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, resistance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are their own.
From One Pack to the Next
Holding selected parents means producing the next generation, and there the choices multiply. The main methods account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Let each 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 alive, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation not improvement.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling again to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It tightens the range quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the second brought mostly vigour.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the traits of two specific plants and show less variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.
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 for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders keeping them treat diversity as the entire point, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be too aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the right option for everyone, and pretending that it is would the product no service.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only plant reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and eventually to produce something new; for anyone else the back shelf is best ignored where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of 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 rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.