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 next to it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply shows several of those traits less since it does not grows a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different set of selected traits.
The Narrowing
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every round of that process halves the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant expressed across slightly different ways.
This is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool altogether. A decade of this leaves a market crowded with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, because most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower making seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong scent suggests it carries the resin genes that are worth keeping.
- Stability. A male that also shows female flowers under normal conditions is discarded outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers in step with the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, floppy male hands that on too.
A Pack Is a Population
The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe 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 compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable variation: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents that are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the choices open up. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It tightens the genetics fast and is used when a single parent shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the traits of the two specific plants and show less spread than the original pack. Done over generations with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is built.
All three require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them treat diversity as the entire value, and selfing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be too aromas and effects that do not exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed into the right option for everyone, and claiming that it is would the product no service.
A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous cut repeated 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 at some point to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is not permitted 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 neither is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.