Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to get value with a population 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 all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is selected with the same care as the female.
A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less visibly because it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a second set of selected genes.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what is left is close to one plant repeated in slightly different forms.
This is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding produces a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone trying to create something new discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and it only exists as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most people never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower making seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is ready.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it holds the resin genes worth keeping.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary conditions is discarded outright; the trait is the last thing worth breeding forward.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen early are often the less desirable genetically; breeders favour steady shedders.
A Pack Is a Population
The error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the spread and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable differences: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It tightens the genetics quickly and is useful when a single parent shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few chosen females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and express narrower spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Open pollination. Allow every male reach each female. It keeps the whole range of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
Each of these require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
A number of lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them treat diversity as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect too aromas and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is does the product no favours.
A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the start of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a specific famous cut repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.