Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized 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 exists at all exists only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a copy.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

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

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less visibly since it does not produce a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line borrows and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a second line of selected traits.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after two rounds what is left is close to one plant expressed across slightly different ways.

This is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the population altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of the same few plants, and a breeder trying to make something new discovers there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and it only exists as long as people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on picking males is rare, since most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone producing seed, these are the marks breeders look for.

• Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
• Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen all at once are frequently also the least desirable in other respects; many breeders favour steady producers.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is more useful than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong scent suggests it holds the resin traits worth passing on.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female flowers under normal conditions is rejected without exception; that tendency is the last thing worth carrying forward.

Thinking in Numbers

A error new regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of running it is to see the spread and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives around five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of selected parents that are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and here the options multiply. The main methods cover most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the range fast and is used when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few picked females, everything else removed. The offspring carry the traits of two specific plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Let each male pollinate every female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not improvement.

Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people keeping them regard the population as the entire point, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a small room. Expect also flavours and chemistry that no longer exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above turns regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the category no favours.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins everything inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and at some point to produce something new; for everyone else the back shelf is safely ignored where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in unmarked packaging 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 differs sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted 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.