Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked cheaper 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 read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a copy.
Not Just Pollen
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, 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 chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply shows some of those traits less visibly because it never produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected genes.
The Narrowing
Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed in slightly different forms.
This is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but absent in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A decade of this produces a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something new discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir can only exists as long as somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Guides on selecting females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most people never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower making seed, these are the signs breeders look for.
- Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear scent indicates it carries the resin genes that are worth keeping.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that on too.
- Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under normal conditions is rejected without exception; the trait is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers in step with the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
- Restraint. Males that dump enormous quantities of pollen early are often also the less selected genetically; breeders favour moderate producers.
A Pack Is a Population
A error new regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of running it is to see the spread and select from it.
Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Holding chosen parents means making the next batch, and there the options multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One picked male to one or a few picked females, every other plant else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of the two specific plants and show less spread than the original pack. Repeated over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to lock in a particular quality. It tightens the genetics quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach every female. It keeps the full range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.
Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
A number of lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people keeping them regard the population as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. Expect also aromas and effects that do not exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the original collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above turns regular seed the right option for everyone, and pretending that it is would the category no favours.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, since a late male in a confined 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 a buyer who is after a specific clone-only cut repeated 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 choose, to keep and at some point to produce something of their own; for everyone else the back shelf is safely left alone.
Ordering and the Law
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence 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.