Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers 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 half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a copy.
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. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the female.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses several of those qualities less because it never produce a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a second line of selected traits.
The Narrowing
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant expressed in slightly different forms.
That is fine for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but absent in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A decade of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to make something new finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, 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; advice on choosing males is scarce, since most people never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
- Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often the less desirable genetically; breeders prefer steady shedders.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures in step with the females is far more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is ready.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong scent suggests it carries the terpene traits worth keeping.
What 10 Seeds Actually Give You
A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one 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 see the range and choose from it.
About 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 assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: stature, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Owning chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the options multiply. The main methods cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring carry the traits of the two specific plants and express less spread than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a new line is built.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the range fast and is useful when one parent shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It preserves the full range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
All three need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat the population as the entire value, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a small room. There will be also aromas and effects that no longer exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.
When the Library Is the Wrong Shop
None of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is would the category no favours.
A grower with room for three plants who needs every one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a known famous plant repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and eventually to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.
Practicalities
Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or both is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.