Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by not growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a copy.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply shows several of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every round of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant expressed in slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of this produces 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 a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir can only exists if people grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is scarce, since most growers never keep one long enough to look. For anyone making seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures in step with the females is far more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is ready.
- Stability. Any male that also forms female pistils under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; the trait is the one thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the desired female habit are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
- Restraint. Plants that release huge amounts of pollen early are frequently the less desirable genetically; many breeders favour moderate producers.
Thinking in Numbers
A error new regular-seed growers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the spread and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real variation: stature, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. That 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 male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents that are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning chosen parents means producing the next batch, and there the choices open up. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It tightens the range quickly and is used when a single plant has something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
All three need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people keeping them treat diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be also aromas and effects that do not appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of origin and the generation it has been reproduced since the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the category no service.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to finish is better off 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 inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a specific clone-only plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to make something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.
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