Regular Seeds: The Archive

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by not seeing one, and how to get value with a population rather than a copy.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it simply shows several of those traits less visibly because it never grows a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different set of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every round of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different ways.

That is fine for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone wanting to create something different finds there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and that reservoir can only exists if people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, since most people do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.

• Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female pistils under normal stress is discarded without exception; the trait is the last thing worth breeding forward.
• Timing. A male that shows 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. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear aroma indicates it carries the terpene traits that are worth passing on.
• Restraint. Plants that release huge quantities of pollen all at once are frequently also the least desirable in other respects; many breeders prefer steady producers.

A Pack Is a Population

The error first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing 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 value of running it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: height, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of selected parents which are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the options multiply. The main methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring back to one of its parents to lock in a particular quality. It tightens the genetics quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the qualities of two selected plants and show narrower variation than the original pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.

All three require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people keeping them treat the population as the whole point, and reversing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect also aromas and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and 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 claiming that it is would the product no favours.

A grower with room for three plants who wants each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a known famous cut reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to make something new; for anyone else the back shelf is best ignored where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.