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 beside it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for 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 attention as the female.
A male contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a different set of selected genes.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what remains is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different forms.
This is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear out of the population altogether. A decade of this leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is little left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and that reservoir only persist if people grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is rare, because most growers do not keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are passed on; a stretched, floppy male hands that down too.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently the less desirable genetically; breeders prefer moderate shedders.
- Stability. A male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal stress is rejected without exception; that trait is the one thing worth carrying into a line.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear scent suggests it carries the resin traits that are worth passing on.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures in step with the females is more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A mistake new regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: stature, finishing time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of selected parents which are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Holding chosen parents means making the next generation, and here the choices open up. The main methods account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Let every male pollinate every female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of two selected plants and show less variation than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is made.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the range quickly and is used when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the second brought mainly vigour.
All three need nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them treat the population as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be also aromas and effects that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above makes regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and pretending that it is would the product no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs 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 every day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known famous plant repeated exactly 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 of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.