Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry 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 buyer loses by never growing one, and how to get value with a population rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less visibly because it never produce a smokable 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 cannot repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not give a second line of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
This is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear from the population altogether. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen plants, and a breeder trying to create something new discovers there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and it only persist if somebody keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most people never keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that resembles the desired female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
- Stability. A male that also forms female flowers under normal conditions is discarded without exception; the trait is the one thing worth breeding into a line.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures in step with the females is far more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often the less selected genetically; breeders prefer moderate shedders.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear scent suggests it holds the terpene genes worth keeping.
Thinking in Numbers
The mistake new regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts 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 observe the range and select from it.
Roughly 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 assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real differences: height, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning chosen parents means producing the next generation, and there the options open up. The main methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or several picked females, everything else removed. The offspring carry the traits of the two specific plants and show narrower variation than the original pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full range of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
- Backcross. Take a chosen offspring again to one of its parents to lock in a specific trait. It tightens the range quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth keeping and the other contributed mostly vigour.
Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not appear 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 grown out from the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed the best choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the product no service.
A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants each day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a small space ruins everything inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and eventually to make something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely left alone.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or both is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.
