Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold 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 contributes, what a grower loses by not growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.

Not Just Pollen

The lazy description 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 which follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less visibly because it does not produce a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross borrows and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not give a different line of selected traits.

How Diversity Leaks Away

Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after two rounds what is left is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different forms.

That is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of this produces a market crowded with versions of the same few plants, and a anyone trying to make something different finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it can only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is scarce, because most people never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone making seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.

  • Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that resembles the desired female habit are passed on; a lanky, floppy male passes that down too.
  • Restraint. Males that release huge quantities of pollen early are often the least desirable genetically; many breeders prefer steady shedders.
  • Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal stress is discarded outright; that trait is the last thing worth breeding forward.
  • Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
  • Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong aroma indicates it carries the resin traits worth keeping.

A Pack Is a Population

A error new regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point 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 around five females to evaluate and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, smell, density, tolerance. This 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 male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents that are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding selected parents means making the next generation, and here the options multiply. Three approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders do.

  • Backcross. Cross a selected offspring back to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.
  • Open pollination. Let each male pollinate each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.
  • Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the qualities of two specific plants and express narrower spread than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.

Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the whole point, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be also aromas and effects that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above makes regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is does the category no favours.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to check the plants each day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to make something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.