Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting 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 paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started 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 because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by not growing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is «a pollen source», and to 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 female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it simply shows some of those qualities less visibly since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected traits.

The Narrowing

Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed across slightly different forms.

That is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the population altogether. A generation of this leaves a market full with versions of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to create something different discovers there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it only persist as long as people keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Guides on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is rare, since most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.

• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers in step with the females is far more workable than a very early one that releases 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 holds the resin genes worth passing on.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
• Restraint. Plants that release huge quantities of pollen all at once are often the less selected in other respects; many breeders prefer moderate producers.
• Stability. Any male that also forms female pistils under ordinary stress is discarded outright; the trait is the one thing worth breeding into a line.

Thinking in Numbers

The error new regular-seed growers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the one 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 see the spread and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect real variation: height, finishing time, smell, density, resistance. This variation 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 has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents which are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding chosen parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main methods cover most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Open pollination. Allow every male reach every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular quality. It narrows the genetics fast and is useful when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds inherit the traits of the two selected plants and express less spread than the original pack. Repeated over generations 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 a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them treat the population as the entire point, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. There will be too aromas and chemistry that no longer exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and pretending that it is would the product no favours.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a specific famous plant reproduced exactly 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 at some point to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the original packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under local rules or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.