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Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers 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 case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy account 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 selected with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses several of those qualities less because it never produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different line of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.

This is acceptable for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder trying to create something different discovers there is nothing left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and that reservoir can only exists as long as people grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is rare, since most people never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Restraint. Plants that release enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often also the least selected genetically; breeders favour steady producers.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear scent suggests it carries the resin genes worth keeping.
• Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under normal stress is discarded outright; the trait is the last thing worth breeding into a line.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

A error new regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the range and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: height, finishing time, smell, density, resistance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding selected parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and there the choices open up. The main methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the traits of two specific plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
• Backcross. Take a chosen offspring again to one of its parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when a single plant shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.

Each of these require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people keeping them treat the population as the whole point, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. There will be too aromas and effects that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its region of collection and the generation it has been grown out from the first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

Nothing of the above turns regular seed the right option for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the product no service.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to check the plants each day around the onset of flower, because a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known famous plant repeated 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 choose, to hold onto and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as collectables 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 responsibility, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.