Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling number of people who understand 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 see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock 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 sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, 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 selected with the same attention as the female.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less because it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each round of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but absent in the chosen clone disappear from the population entirely. A generation of this produces a market full with variations of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to make something new discovers there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and it can only persist as long as people grows it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on selecting females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, since most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female pistils under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; the tendency is the last thing worth carrying forward.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before any female is ready.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it holds the resin traits worth keeping.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and branching that resembles the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often the less desirable genetically; many breeders prefer moderate producers.
A Pack Is a Population
A error new regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts 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 point of running it is to see the spread and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: height, flowering time, smell, density, tolerance. This variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents which are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what home breeders do.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation not refinement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several picked females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and show narrower spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling again to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
Each of these need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard diversity as the entire point, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. There will be too flavours and chemistry that do not appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the category no favours.
A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants each day during the start of flower, because a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and at some point to produce something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.