Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, 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 that half is selected with the same care as the female.
A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less visibly because it never grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide 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 selfing halves the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to create something new finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only exists as long as somebody grows it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is scarce, since most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone producing seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often the less desirable genetically; many breeders favour steady producers.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong aroma suggests it carries the resin traits that are worth keeping.
- Stability. A male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal stress is rejected without exception; that trait is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the desired female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
A Pack Is a Population
A error new regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to see the range and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable differences: height, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. This variation 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 cannot offer: a pair of chosen parents which are theirs.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning chosen parents means making the next generation, and there the choices multiply. The main methods cover most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Backcross. Cross a selected offspring back to one of its parents to lock in a specific quality. It narrows the range fast and is useful when one parent has something worth keeping and the second brought mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring carry the traits of two selected plants and express narrower variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is made.
- Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
All three require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat the population as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be too aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been reproduced since the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above makes regular seed the right choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the product no service.
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 anyone unable to inspect the plants every day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a known famous cut repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and eventually to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is safely left alone.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or both is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.