Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a population rather than a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The easy description 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 that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those qualities less because it does not grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected traits.
The Narrowing
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every generation of that selfing 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 acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen plants, and a anyone trying to make something different discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir can only persist if somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing 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.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female flowers under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; the trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is far more workable than an 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 flower parts and a strong scent indicates it holds the resin genes that are worth keeping.
- Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently the least selected in other respects; breeders prefer moderate producers.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A mistake first-time regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of running it is to observe the range and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means 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, look for noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the options multiply. The main methods account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It tightens the genetics fast and is useful when one plant has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a generous 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 goal is preservation rather than refinement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, everything else removed. The offspring carry the traits of two specific plants and express narrower spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the entire value, and selfing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be also aromas and effects that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the generation it has been reproduced since the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no favours.
A grower with space for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, because a late male in a confined space ruins everything within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a specific famous plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or neither is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer's job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.