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 group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold 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 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 lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, 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 care as the female.

A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less visibly since it never produce a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that process halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what is left is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different ways.

This is fine for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone trying to make something different discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and that reservoir can only persist as long as people keep growing it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, because most people never keep one long enough to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that down too.
• Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers in step with the females is far more useful than an early one that sheds pollen before the female is ready.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear aroma suggests it carries the terpene genes that are worth passing on.
• Restraint. Males that release huge quantities of pollen early are often also the less desirable genetically; many breeders favour moderate shedders.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value 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 something like five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents that are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the options multiply. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.

• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few picked females, every other plant else culled. The offspring inherit the qualities of two selected plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its parents to lock in a particular trait. It narrows the range fast and is used when one plant has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mainly vigour.

All three need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders keeping them treat the population as the whole point, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not in a small room. Expect too flavours and chemistry that do not appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the original collection.

The Honest Exclusions

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

A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a known clone-only plant reproduced as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and at some point to make something new; for anyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or both is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.