Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a dwindling number of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers 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 is for, what a grower gives up by not seeing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a copy.

The Other Half of the Genome

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

A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a different set 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, reversed and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what remains is close to one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

This is fine for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the chosen clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to create something different finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir only persist if people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is scarce, since most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.

• Stability. A male that also shows female pistils under ordinary conditions is rejected without exception; the trait is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
• Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen early are frequently also the least desirable genetically; breeders prefer steady producers.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong scent indicates it carries the terpene traits worth keeping.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a lanky, floppy male passes that down too.

Thinking in Numbers

A error first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real differences: stature, finishing time, smell, density, resistance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents that are their own.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding selected parents means making the next generation, and here the choices multiply. Three approaches account for most of what home breeders attempt.

• Backcross. Take a chosen offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when a single parent has something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Let each male reach each female. It keeps the whole range of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept going, and it is the correct method when the aim is preservation not refinement.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the qualities of two selected plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.

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

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them regard diversity as the entire point, and reversing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not in a tent. Expect also aromas and effects that no longer exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out from the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

Nothing of the above makes regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is would the category no service.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the start of flower, since a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a specific clone-only 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 produce something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.