Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.

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 all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply shows several of those traits less visibly because it never grows a smokable flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a different line of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different forms.

That is fine for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear out of the gene pool entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only exists if somebody grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, since most people never keep one long enough to look. For anyone producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.

• Timing. A male that declares sex first 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 ready.
• Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often the less desirable genetically; breeders favour steady producers.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and branching that resembles the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, floppy male hands that on too.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it carries the resin genes worth keeping.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female pistils under ordinary stress is discarded outright; the trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.

A Pack Is a Population

A mistake new regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same 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 observe the spread and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable differences: height, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

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

• Open pollination. Allow each male reach every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation not refinement.
• Selected cross. One picked male to one or a few chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the traits of the two selected plants and show less variation than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It tightens the range fast and is used when a single parent shows something worth concentrating and the second brought mainly vigour.

Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard the population as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. Expect too flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been grown out since the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

Nothing of the above makes regular seed the best choice 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 flower is better served with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the start of flower, since a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a known famous cut repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to produce something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely left alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.