Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking 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 nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male passes on structure, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just expresses several of those qualities less because it does not grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a different line of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
This is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone vanish from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with variations of the same few clones, and a anyone wanting to create something different finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and that reservoir can only exists if people keep growing it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most growers never keep one long enough to look. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.
- Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often also the least selected genetically; many breeders favour steady shedders.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal conditions is rejected outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong aroma indicates it holds the terpene genes that are worth passing on.
A Pack Is a Population
A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. 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.
About 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 judge for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: height, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents which are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding chosen parents means producing the next batch, and here the choices multiply. Three approaches cover most of what home breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few chosen females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and show less variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is made.
- Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate each female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not refinement.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling back to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when one parent has something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.
All three need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.
Landraces and Heirloom Lines
A number of lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard the population as the whole value, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not under a small room. Expect also aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of origin and the generation it has been grown out since the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a specific clone-only cut reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and at some point to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely ignored where it is.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the original packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.