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 bought by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by not growing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a clone.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the female.
A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less visibly since it does not grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different line of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two rounds what is left is close to one plant expressed in slightly different ways.
This is fine for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market full with versions of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to make something new discovers there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir only exists if somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on selecting females are everywhere; advice on picking males is rare, because most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone producing seed, these are the signs breeders look for.
- Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often the least desirable genetically; breeders prefer moderate shedders.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and branching that resembles the desired female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
- Stability. A male that also shows female flowers under normal stress is discarded outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it holds the resin genes that are worth keeping.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
The error new regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect real differences: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of selected parents which are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning selected parents means making the next batch, and there the options open up. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling again to one of its original parents to lock in a specific quality. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when one plant has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mostly vigour.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else removed. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and express narrower spread than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with consistent choices, this is how a new line is made.
Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard diversity as the whole point, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be too flavours and effects that do not exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been reproduced since the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the category no service.
A grower with room for three plants who needs every one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day during the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a specific clone-only cut reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and eventually to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best ignored alone.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed 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.
