Regular Seeds: Cannabis’s Genetic Library

Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking number 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 bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace 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 argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

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

A male contributes growth habit, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less visibly because it does not produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different line of selected traits.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is essentially one plant repeated in marginally different forms.

That is fine for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear out of the population altogether. A generation of this produces a market full with versions of the same few plants, and a anyone wanting to create something new discovers there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it can only exists as long as somebody grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most people never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.

• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that matches the desired female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
• Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often the least selected in other respects; breeders prefer moderate producers.
• Stability. A male that also shows female flowers under ordinary conditions is rejected without exception; the trait is the one thing anyone wants carrying forward.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures in step with the females is more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The error first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: height, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of selected parents which are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and here the options multiply. The main methods cover most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Open pollination. Allow every male reach each female. It preserves the full range of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the second brought mostly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the traits of the two selected plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a new line is made.

Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people keeping them treat diversity as the whole point, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be too aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the generation it has been grown out from the original collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the product no service.

A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, because a late male in a small space ruins everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a known famous plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and eventually to produce 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 plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or neither is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.