Why Breeders Still Buy Regular Seeds

Walk 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 bought by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.

Not Just Pollen

The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of 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 structure, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a second set of selected genes.

The Narrowing

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that selfing halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed across slightly different ways.

That is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding produces a market full with versions of the same few plants, and a anyone wanting to make something different discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it can only exists as long as people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is scarce, since most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.

• Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen early are often also the least desirable in other respects; many breeders prefer steady producers.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong aroma suggests it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
• Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.

A Pack Is a Population

A error first-time regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of chosen parents that are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding chosen parents means producing the next generation, and here the options open up. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when one parent has something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the traits of two specific plants and show narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a new line is made.
• Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation not improvement.

Each of these require only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard the population as the whole point, and selfing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. Expect too aromas and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been grown out 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 favours.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only cut 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 hold onto and eventually to produce something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.