Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to see 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 feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because somebody held onto 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 single plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by never seeing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a copy.
The Other Half of the Genome
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene profile just as the female does; it just expresses several of those qualities less because it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated across slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to create something different discovers there is little left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it can only persist as long as people grows it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, since most people do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.
- Stability. A male that also shows female pistils under ordinary conditions is discarded outright; that tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is far more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before the 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 resin genes that are worth keeping.
- Restraint. Males that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often also the less selected genetically; breeders favour moderate producers.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that resembles the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
The error first-time regular-seed growers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to see the range and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for real differences: stature, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. This 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 now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents that are their own.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning chosen parents means making the next generation, and there the choices multiply. Three methods cover most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and express less variation than the original pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
- Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It keeps 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 going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
- Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the range fast and is useful when one plant shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.
All three require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the entire value, and selfing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been grown out from the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right option for everyone, and pretending that it is does the product no service.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous cut repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto 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 dispatches each order in plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or neither is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.