Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line began 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 exists because somebody kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by never seeing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
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 that follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on structure, vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less visibly since it does not grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not give a second set of selected genes.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what remains is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different forms.
This is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish out of the population altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to create something new discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir can only exists as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on selecting females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is scarce, since most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
- Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen all at once are frequently the less desirable in other respects; many breeders prefer steady producers.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong aroma suggests it holds the terpene traits worth passing on.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under ordinary conditions is discarded outright; the tendency is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
A Pack Is a Population
The error new regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the range and select from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for real differences: height, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and here the choices multiply. The main methods cover most of what home breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and express narrower variation than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a new line is built.
- Backcross. Take a selected offspring back to one of its original parents to lock in a specific quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not refinement.
Each of these need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be too aromas and effects that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the original collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and claiming that it is does the product no favours.
A grower with space for three plants who needs every one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone unable to inspect the plants each day during the start of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a known famous cut reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and eventually to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is safely ignored alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply 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 allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.