Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a population rather than 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 all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male passes on structure, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it simply shows several of those qualities less because it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different ways.
This is acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to create something new discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and it can only exists as long as people grows it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on selecting females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, because most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, these are the marks breeders look for.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; that trait is the last thing worth carrying forward.
- Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it carries the terpene genes worth keeping.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
- Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen all at once are frequently the less desirable in other respects; breeders favour steady producers.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A error new regular-seed growers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the spread and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real variation: height, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.
Making Your Own Seed
Owning chosen parents means making the next batch, and there the options open up. The main methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or a few chosen females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the traits of the two specific plants and express narrower spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a new line is made.
- Backcross. Take a selected offspring back to one of its parents to lock in a particular quality. It tightens the genetics fast and is used when a single plant shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach every female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
All three need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them treat diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not in a tent. Expect too aromas and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is does the product no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a known clone-only plant reproduced as closely as possible 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 at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation 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 responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.