Browse 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 picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a clone.
The easy description of a male cannabis plant is «the one that makes pollen», and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the mother.
A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less visibly since it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.
A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different ways.
That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone vanish out of the population entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone trying to create something different finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it can only persist as long as people keep growing it.
Guides on selecting females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, since most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.
A mistake new 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 value of running it is to see the spread and choose 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 cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect real variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. 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 has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.
Holding selected parents means producing the next generation, and here the options multiply. Three approaches cover most of what home breeders attempt.
Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.
Some lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.
Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be too aromas and effects that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the generation it has been grown out since the first collection.
Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no favours.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone unable to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins everything inside days. A person 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 cut repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and at some point to make something new; for anyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.
CARBURANTES MONTILLA S.L. ha recibido una ayuda de la Unión Europea con cargo al Programa Operativo FEDER de Andalucía 2014-2020, financiada como parte de la respuesta de la Unión a la pandemia de COVID-19 (REACT-UE), para compensar el sobrecoste energético de gas natural y/o electricidad a pymes y autónomos especialmente afectados por el incremento de los precios del gas natural y la electricidad provocados por el impacto de la guerra de agresión de Rusia contra Ucrania.
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