Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable 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.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy 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 half is chosen with the same care as the female.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less since it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work 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. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected genes.

The Narrowing

Much of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is essentially one plant repeated across marginally different forms.

That is fine for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that were present in the original line but absent in the chosen clone vanish from the population altogether. A generation of this produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something different discovers there is little left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and that reservoir only persist as long as people keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is scarce, because most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower producing seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.

• Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers in step with the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Stability. A male that also shows female flowers under ordinary conditions is discarded outright; that tendency is the one thing worth carrying into a line.
• Restraint. Males that release enormous quantities of pollen early are frequently the least desirable genetically; many breeders favour steady producers.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that resembles the desired female habit are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong scent suggests it carries the resin genes that are worth passing on.

A Pack Is a Population

A mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of running it is to observe the spread 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 either cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real differences: height, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents that are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its parents to lock in a specific trait. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow every male reach each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of the two specific plants and show narrower spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a stable line is made.

All three need nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect too flavours and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been reproduced since the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

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

A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to flower is better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a known famous plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to produce something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain parcels 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 import is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.