Regular Seeds: The Archive

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. 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 exists at all exists because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a grower loses by not growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and for 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 care as the mother.

A male contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less visibly because it does not grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different set of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each round of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what is left is essentially one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

That is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to create something different finds there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it only persist as long as people keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, because most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders look for.

• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong aroma suggests it holds the resin genes worth passing on.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Restraint. Plants that release huge quantities of pollen early are frequently also the less desirable in other respects; many breeders favour moderate producers.
• Stability. A male that at the same time shows female pistils under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; the tendency is the last thing worth breeding into a line.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The error new regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to see the spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, resistance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of chosen parents which are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and there the choices open up. Three approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its parents to lock in a specific quality. It tightens the range fast and is used when one plant has something worth keeping and the other brought mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, everything else removed. The offspring inherit the qualities of two specific plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is built.
• Open pollination. Allow every male reach each female. It preserves the full range of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not improvement.

Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

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 available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the whole value, and reversing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not under a small room. Expect also aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of origin and the generation it has been reproduced since the first collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above makes regular seed the best choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the product no service.

A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to inspect the plants every day around the start of flower, since a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a specific famous 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 at some point to make something new; for anyone else the back shelf is safely ignored where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.