Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. 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 exists only because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by not growing one, and how to get value with a population rather than 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 the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less visibly since it does not grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected traits.
The Narrowing
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different ways.
This is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the population altogether. A decade of this produces a market full with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone trying to make something different discovers there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and it can only exists as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is rare, since most growers never keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Restraint. Males that dump enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently the least desirable genetically; many breeders favour moderate producers.
- Stability. Any male that also shows female flowers under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; the trait is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it carries the resin traits that are worth passing on.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
The error first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of running it is to observe the spread and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for real differences: height, flowering time, smell, 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 male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning selected parents means producing the next generation, and here the options multiply. Three methods cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else removed. The seeds carry the traits of two specific plants and express narrower spread than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when one parent has something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.
All three need only 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
A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them regard the population as the whole value, and selfing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the original collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above makes regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is would the product no service.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the start of flower, since a missed male in a confined space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known famous plant reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and eventually to make something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or neither is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.