Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought 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 read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a clone.
The Other Half of the Genome
The lazy account 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 care as the female.
A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less visibly because it does not produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed invest at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected genes.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each round of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed across slightly different forms.
This is fine for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of the same few plants, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir only persist if somebody keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Articles on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is scarce, since most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen early are often also the less desirable in other respects; breeders favour steady producers.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures in step with the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under ordinary stress is rejected outright; that tendency is the last thing worth breeding forward.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear aroma suggests it carries the resin genes that are worth keeping.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A 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 slice of a population, and the value of running it is to see the spread and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: height, finishing time, aroma, density, tolerance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents that are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning selected parents means making the next generation, and there the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when one parent has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full range of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, every other plant else culled. The seeds inherit the qualities of two selected plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.
All three need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people keeping them regard the population as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be too flavours and effects that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above turns regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the category no service.
A grower with space for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to check the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds everything within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only cut repeated exactly 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 anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as 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 allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.