Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer 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 breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because someone 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 one plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by not seeing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of 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 all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less visibly because it does not grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that process halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what remains is close to one plant expressed across slightly different forms.
That is fine for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but absent in the chosen clone disappear out of the population entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with variations of the same few plants, and a anyone trying to create something new discovers there is little left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and it can only persist as long as somebody grows it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most people do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Stability. A male that at the same time forms female pistils under normal stress is discarded without exception; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that matches the desired female habit are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is far more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it carries the terpene genes worth passing on.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A error new regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances 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 see the range and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for real differences: height, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents which are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Holding chosen parents means producing the next generation, and here the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to lock in a particular quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when a single plant shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It keeps the whole range of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few chosen females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of the two selected plants and express less variation than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
All three require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the whole point, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not in a small room. There will be also flavours and chemistry 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 origin and the generation it has been grown out since the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above turns regular seed the right choice for everyone, and pretending that it is would the product no favours.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, because a missed male in a confined space ruins the whole crop inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a specific famous plant reproduced as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and eventually to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in plain parcels 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 import is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.
