Why We Still Offer Regular Cannabis Seeds

Why choose regular seeds when most growers only want females? We asked Sasha Joint Doctor, the creator of the original Lowryder, why Doctor’s Choice keeps regular cannabis seeds in the catalog. This is his answer.

Just to clarify, regular cannabis seeds will give you a mix of male and female plants, as opposed to feminized seeds.

It’s a good question. As we all know, male plants are useful if you want to produce your own seeds. If that’s what you’d like to do, I believe it’s your right.

It’s the natural right of any farmer to produce and keep their own seed. That’s how it has always been.

We respect that right. In fact, we encourage you to try it for yourself, and that’s why we offer regular seeds. If you’re like me and you want to make seeds or develop a strain of your own, males allow you to do that.

And why not? If you try a little breeding of your own, you might eventually create a whole new strain, one that may even surpass the original. It can happen.

Males are pollen donors, but that’s it. Unfortunately, they don’t produce the bud that we love. So if you’re like most growers and you only grow to harvest flowers, males are useless. In fact, they’re a nuisance, because nobody wants to smoke a seedy bud.

One of my favorite lines comes from a classic Michael Palmer reggae tune, about how smoking the seed kills the breed. After a few puffs of sinsemilla (from the Spanish sin semilla, “without seed”), this question often leads me to an even bigger one. What is the real purpose of males, anyway?

I discussed exactly this with one of the founders of 420 Fast Buds at the Autoflower World Cup in Berlin in June 2026. What is the purpose of males, genetically? You can take the question far beyond cannabis, to other species and even to humans. What is the point of having two sexes at all?

The Feminized Seed Revolution

Let’s back up a little. In recent years, there has been a strong trend to feminize cannabis. Feminization was one of the biggest innovations in breeding, and its aim was to give growers 100% female seeds.

Before, it took a whole generation to isolate and clone a selected female mother while getting rid of all the males. For the home grower, this was a revolution, because there was no longer any need to waste space and time on male plants.

Breeders are no longer obliged to work with males either. A female treated with certain chemicals or hormones produces pollen that can be used to pollinate another female. You can even pollinate a female with her own pollen, which is called selfing.

That simplifies things, because it removes a real dilemma: you can’t tell what kind of female flowers you’ll get by looking at the father’s balls. As long as you only produce feminized seeds, you never have to deal with males again.

But take note. If a line is maintained only through feminized seeds and no males have been kept, you can’t get regular seeds out of it again unless you bring in a male from outside.

Is that a bad thing? If we’re better off without males, what was the point of them in the first place?

Why Choose Regular Seeds?

There are many biological reasons for sexual reproduction, in cannabis just like in humans. On an evolutionary level, it’s quite complex, but basically, sex reshuffles the genes of two parents in every generation, and that helps a population adapt to a changing environment and resist disease.

I am not an academic. Through my own growing, I have seen how genetics works, but it still holds many mysteries for me. My concern is that getting rid of males altogether could reduce diversity by leaving fewer people making their own seeds.

Most home growers never try feminization techniques, so without males they have no easy way to make their own seed. Fewer people making seed means a smaller gene pool going forward, and seed production ends up concentrated in the hands of a few breeders. The average person can no longer easily reproduce a plant from seed, something people have done for thousands of years.

If this trend continues, male plants, and regular people making their own seeds, will become a thing of the past.

So what’s the point of males? My answer is simple: diversity, and fun. It’s fun to dream up something that doesn’t exist yet and create it in your own garden. Take it from me.

Sasha Joint Doctor

If You Want to Try

Sasha’s own Lowryder first reached growers as regular seed, and regular seeds are still the simplest way to start a breeding project of your own.

Our Be a Breeder collection gathers the regular strains we selected as breeding stock. Lowryder is in it too, the original autoflower that helped shape the history of autoflower breeding.

mutantfarmer’s work with mutant autoflowers is part of that story. Read more in Mutant Autoflower Breeding: Freakshow and Australian Bastard Cannabis.

And if you start a project of your own, share it. DC Family, our community on Discord, is where growers post their breeding reports and compare notes.

We’ve also opened a Breeding Room, where we document our ongoing breeding projects. You can follow Velluto, Black Mamba #42 Auto, and Tulga Parvati through dated notes, photos, and the decisions behind each line as it develops.