Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller 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 obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back 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 unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, 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 selected with the same attention as the female.
A male passes on structure, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less visibly since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line borrows and can never replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a second line of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that process halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what is left is close to one plant expressed in slightly different forms.
That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with variations of the same few plants, and a breeder wanting to create something new discovers there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it can only persist if somebody grows it.
Reading a Male Plant
Articles on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, since most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong aroma indicates it carries the resin traits that are worth passing on.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
- Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under normal conditions is rejected outright; that trait is the last thing worth carrying forward.
- Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently also the least desirable genetically; many breeders favour moderate producers.
A Pack Is a Population
The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make 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 slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to see the spread and choose from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and there the choices multiply. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, every other plant else culled. The seeds inherit the qualities of two specific plants and show narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a new line is made.
- Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It tightens the range fast and is useful when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
All three need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
Some lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the entire point, and selfing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the best option for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the product no favours.
A grower with room for three plants who wants each one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the start of flower, because a late male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a specific famous 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 hold onto and at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is best ignored alone.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.