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 picked up by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy account 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 which follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less since it does not produce a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different line of selected traits.
The Narrowing
A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what remains is close to one plant expressed in slightly different ways.
That is acceptable for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to create something new discovers there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir can only persist as long as somebody keep growing it.
Reading a Male Plant
Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, since most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.
- Restraint. Plants that release huge amounts of pollen early are often the least desirable genetically; breeders prefer steady producers.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded without exception; the trait is the last thing anyone wants breeding forward.
- Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the desired female shape are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
- Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers in step with the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
The mistake first-time regular-seed growers make 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 sample of a population, and the point of running it is to see the spread and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect real variation: height, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. This variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are their own.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the choices multiply. Three approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several picked females, every other plant else culled. The seeds inherit the traits of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
- Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its parents to lock in a particular quality. It tightens the range fast and is useful when one parent shows something worth keeping and the other brought mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male pollinate each female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not refinement.
All three need nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the entire point, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not in a small room. Expect too flavours and chemistry that do not appear 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 generation it has been grown out from the first collection.
The Honest Exclusions
None of the above turns regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is would the product no service.
A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the start of flower, because a late male in a confined space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a specific famous plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and at some point to make something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or neither is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.