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 picked up by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace 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 grower loses by never seeing 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 „the one that makes pollen“, and to a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same care as the female.

A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less since it does not grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross borrows and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what is left is close to one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

That is fine for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden faults emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to make something new finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and that reservoir only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on selecting females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, because most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.

  • Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
  • Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are passed on; a stretched, floppy male hands that on too.
  • Restraint. Plants that release huge quantities of pollen early are often the less selected in other respects; breeders prefer steady shedders.
  • Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal stress is discarded outright; the trait is the one thing anyone wants carrying forward.
  • Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear scent indicates it holds the resin traits that are worth keeping.

A Pack Is a Population

A mistake first-time regular-seed growers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts 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 growing it is to see the range and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: height, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the choices open up. The main methods account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

  • Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the traits of the two specific plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is built.
  • Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate every female. It preserves the full range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
  • Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the range fast and is used when a single parent has something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.

Each of these require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them treat the population as the entire point, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a small room. Expect too flavours and effects that do not exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of origin and the generation it has been reproduced since the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the product no favours.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the start of flower, since 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 select from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous plant reproduced as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or neither is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.