Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, offered 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 buyer gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is chosen with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less since it does not grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not give a different line of selected traits.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

That is acceptable for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the selected clone vanish from the population entirely. A decade of this leaves a market crowded with versions of a dozen plants, and a breeder wanting to create something new discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and that reservoir only exists if somebody keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is scarce, because most people never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.

• Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen all at once are frequently the least selected genetically; many breeders prefer moderate shedders.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear aroma suggests it carries the resin traits that are worth keeping.
• Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; the tendency is the last thing worth breeding forward.

A Pack Is a Population

A mistake new regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts 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 point 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 around five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect real differences: stature, finishing time, smell, bud structure, resistance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents that are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding selected parents means making the next batch, and here the options open up. Three methods cover most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of the two selected plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a new line is built.
• Open pollination. Let every male pollinate each female. It keeps the full range of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a particular quality. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.

All three require only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

A number of lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people maintaining them regard the population as the entire value, and reversing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. Expect too flavours and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. 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.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the product no service.

A grower with space for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the start of flower, since a late male in a small space seeds everything within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a known clone-only cut reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and at some point to produce something of their own; for everyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and nothing 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 widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or neither is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.