Regular Seeds: Cannabis’s Genetic Library

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a dwindling number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a copy.

Not Just Pollen

The easy description 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 that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those qualities less because it does not produce a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different line of selected genes.

The Narrowing

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different forms.

This is fine for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the selected clone vanish out of the population entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to make something different finds there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and that reservoir can only persist as long as people keep growing it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most people never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower making seed, these are the marks breeders look for.

• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it carries the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• Stability. Any male that also forms female pistils under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; the trait is the last thing worth carrying forward.
• Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often the less desirable genetically; breeders prefer steady shedders.
• Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and branching that matches the desired female habit are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.

Thinking in Numbers

A error new regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the range and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents that are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the options open up. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring back to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It tightens the range fast and is useful when one parent shows something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not refinement.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few chosen females, every other plant else culled. The offspring inherit the traits of the two selected plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is made.

Each of these require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them treat the population as the whole point, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not under a tent. There will be too flavours and chemistry that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above makes regular seed the best choice for everyone, and claiming that it is does the product no favours.

A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, because a late 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 known famous plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and eventually to produce something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places buying 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 responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.