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 next to it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. 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 diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by not seeing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, 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 selected with the same care as the female.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it just expresses some of those qualities less visibly because it does not grows a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a different line of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed in slightly different ways.
This is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone disappear out of the population entirely. A generation of this produces a market full with variations of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to create something different discovers there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and it can only exists as long as somebody keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on choosing females are easy to find; advice on picking males is scarce, because most growers do not keep one long enough to look. For a grower making seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear scent indicates it holds the resin genes worth passing on.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers in step with the females is more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
- Restraint. Plants that release huge amounts of pollen all at once are frequently the least desirable in other respects; breeders prefer moderate shedders.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
- Stability. A male that also shows female pistils under normal stress is discarded without exception; the trait is the one thing anyone wants carrying forward.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
The error first-time regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value 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 yields around five females to compare and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. That spread is not a flaw 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 selected parents that are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding selected parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and here the options multiply. Three approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds inherit the qualities of two selected plants and express less variation than the original pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Open pollination. Allow each male reach every female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring again to one of its parents to lock in a specific trait. It narrows the range quickly and is used when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
Each of these require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people keeping them treat diversity as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a small room. There will be also aromas and effects that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of origin and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed into the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the category no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds everything inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a specific famous plant repeated as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and eventually to make something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.