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 beside it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered 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 contributes, what a grower loses by never seeing one, and how to get value with a population rather than a copy.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, 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 chosen with the same attention as the female.
A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just shows some of those qualities less visibly since it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different line of selected genes.
How Diversity Leaks Away
A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is close to one plant repeated in marginally different forms.
This is acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone vanish from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to make something new finds there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and it can only exists as long as somebody keep growing it.
Reading a Male Plant
Guides on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is scarce, because most growers never keep one long enough to look. For a grower making seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.
- Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Stability. A male that at the same time forms female pistils under normal conditions is rejected without exception; the tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it holds the resin traits that are worth keeping.
- Restraint. Plants that dump huge quantities of pollen early are frequently also the least selected in other respects; breeders prefer steady producers.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, floppy male passes that down too.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
The mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the range and select from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: height, flowering time, aroma, density, resistance. That spread is not a flaw 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 supply: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding chosen parents means making the next batch, and here the options multiply. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when one parent shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
- Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The offspring carry the qualities of the two specific plants and express less variation than the original pack. Done over generations with consistent selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
All three require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
A number of lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people keeping them treat diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is does the category no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the start of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a known famous cut reproduced 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 at some point to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.