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 picked up by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers 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 one plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.
Not Just Pollen
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to 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, vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less since it does not grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected genes.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that process halves the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is close to one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
That is fine for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the chosen clone disappear out of the gene pool altogether. A decade of this leaves a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to make something different discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and it only persist as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on choosing females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, because most growers never keep one long enough to look. For anyone producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is more useful than an early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female pistils under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; that trait is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the desired female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male passes that down too.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it carries the terpene traits that are worth keeping.
A Pack Is a Population
A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same 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 observe the range and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real variation: stature, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never offer: a line of selected parents that are their own.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning selected parents means making the next batch, and here the options open up. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does 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 improvement.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or a few chosen females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the traits of the two selected plants and express narrower variation than the original pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It tightens the range quickly and is used when a single plant has something worth keeping and the other brought mainly vigour.
All three require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment 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 regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the whole point, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not in a small room. There will be also aromas and chemistry that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of origin and the generation it has been grown out from the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above turns regular seed into the right option for everyone, and pretending that it is does the product no service.
A grower with room for three plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot select from. And anyone 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 intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.
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