Regular Seeds: Cannabis’s Genetic Library

Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see 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 expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because somebody held onto 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 sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

The easy description 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 that follows, and that half is selected with the same care as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less visibly because it never grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a second line of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what remains is close to one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

That is acceptable for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the population entirely. A generation of this produces a market full with variations of a dozen plants, and a anyone trying to create something new discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and it can only exists as long as somebody keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Guides on selecting females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, because most growers do not keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.

• Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures in step with the females is more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
• Stability. Any male that also shows female flowers under normal stress is discarded without exception; that trait is the one thing worth breeding into a line.
• Restraint. Males that release enormous quantities of pollen early are frequently also the less desirable genetically; breeders favour steady producers.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it holds the resin traits worth passing on.

A Pack Is a Population

The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning chosen parents means making the next batch, and here the choices multiply. The main methods cover most of what home breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, makes a large quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling again to one of its original parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the range fast and is useful when one parent has something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the traits of two selected plants and show less variation than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.

Each of these need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them treat the population as the whole point, and reversing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect also flavours and effects that do not appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is does the product no service.

A grower with room for three plants who wants each one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a small space ruins 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 is after a specific famous cut repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain parcels with the original packs intact inside and no on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.