Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a 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 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 female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by never growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a copy.
Not Just Pollen
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 that half is selected with the same attention as the mother.
A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less because it does not produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different line of selected traits.
What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed
Much of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant repeated in marginally different ways.
This is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the selected clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to make something new finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and it can only exists if somebody keep growing it.
Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About
Guides on choosing females are easy to find; advice on picking males is scarce, since most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it holds the terpene genes worth keeping.
- Restraint. Plants that release huge quantities of pollen early are often also the least desirable in other respects; many breeders favour moderate producers.
- Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female flowers under normal conditions is discarded without exception; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
- Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that down too.
- Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures in step with the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
A Pack Is a Population
A error new regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same 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 see the range and select from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to compare and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: stature, flowering time, smell, density, tolerance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.
Three Ways to Cross
Holding chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and here the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when one plant has something worth concentrating and the second brought mostly vigour.
- Selected cross. One picked male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Done over generations with consistent choices, this is how a new line is built.
- Open pollination. Let every male pollinate every female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
Each of these require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.
Keeping Old Lines Alive
Some lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat diversity as the whole value, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be too flavours and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
None of the above makes regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the category no service.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a specific clone-only cut repeated as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and eventually to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is best ignored alone.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked packaging with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful 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.