Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling 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 closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows some of those traits less visibly because it does not produce a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected genes.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the remaining genetic variation, and after two rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated across slightly different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone vanish out of the population entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder trying to create something new finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and it only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, because most people do not keep one long enough to look. For a grower making seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it carries the resin genes that are worth keeping.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape 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 more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal stress is discarded outright; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often the less desirable genetically; breeders favour moderate producers.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A error first-time regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to see the spread and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, 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 has something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning selected parents means producing the next generation, and here the choices multiply. The main approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling again to one of its parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when one parent has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the traits of the two selected plants and express less variation than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Open pollination. Let each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
All three need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them regard the population as the entire value, and selfing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be too aromas and chemistry that no longer exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the category no service.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person 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 repeated 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 at some point to produce something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left alone.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to reveal 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 buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.