Walk 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 bought by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by not growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the mother.

A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a different line of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every round of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what remains is close to one plant expressed in marginally different ways.

This is fine for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the population altogether. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with variations of the same few plants, and a breeder trying to create something new finds there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it can only exists if people grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is scarce, since most people do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.

• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it carries the terpene genes worth keeping.
• Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and a frame that resembles the desired female habit are inherited; a lanky, floppy male hands that down too.
• Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen all at once are often also the less selected in other respects; breeders favour moderate producers.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures in step with the females is more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into 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 slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to see the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for real variation: height, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents means producing the next generation, and here the choices open up. Three approaches cover most of what home breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It keeps the full range of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the traits of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with consistent selection, this is how a new line is built.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the genetics quickly and is used when one plant has something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.

All three need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. Expect also flavours and chemistry that do not exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of origin 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 turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the product no service.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, because a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a specific famous cut reproduced exactly 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 at some point to produce something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is best ignored where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or neither is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.