Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. 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 survives at all exists because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended 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 buyer loses by never seeing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a copy.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less visibly because it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend 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 gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected genes.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each round of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what is left is close to one plant repeated in marginally different ways.
That is acceptable for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the population altogether. A decade of such breeding leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone trying to create something new finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only persist as long as people keep growing it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is scarce, since most growers never keep one long enough to look. For anyone producing seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it carries the terpene genes that are worth passing on.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen early are often the least selected in other respects; breeders favour moderate producers.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
- Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal stress is rejected without exception; that trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
Thinking in Numbers
The error new regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the range and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect real variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation not refinement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, everything else removed. The seeds inherit the qualities of two selected plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
- Backcross. Take a chosen offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular quality. It tightens the range quickly and is used when one parent shows something worth concentrating and the other contributed mostly vigour.
Each of these require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard diversity as the entire point, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be also flavours and effects that do not exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the product no favours.
A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, since a late male in a small space ruins everything within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone 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 new; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely left alone.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.