Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since 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 instead of a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is selected with the same care as the female.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less visibly since it does not produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every generation of that selfing halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed across slightly different ways.
This is fine for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone disappear out of the population entirely. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of the same few plants, and a breeder wanting to make something new discovers there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it can only persist as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, because most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong scent suggests it carries the resin traits worth passing on.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick main stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are inherited; a lanky, floppy male hands that on too.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female pistils under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; the trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
- Restraint. Males that dump enormous quantities of pollen early are often also the least selected in other respects; breeders prefer steady shedders.
Thinking in Numbers
A mistake new regular-seed growers make is seeing 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 growing it is to see the spread and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of selected parents that are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Holding chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and here the options open up. The main methods cover most of what home breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and express less variation than the original pack. Repeated over generations with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is made.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach every female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the genetics quickly and is useful when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the other contributed mostly vigour.
Each of these need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them treat the population as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. There will be wide 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 flavours and effects that no longer appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is does the product no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the start of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a specific famous plant repeated as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best left alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.
