Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace 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 half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to get value with a pack instead of a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same care as the mother.

A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less visibly because it never grows a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line borrows and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields 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 single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every generation of that selfing halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

That is acceptable for a consumer who needs that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the gene pool altogether. A generation of this produces a market crowded with variations of a dozen plants, and a anyone trying to create something different discovers there is little left to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it only exists if people keep growing it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is rare, because most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Timing. A male that declares sex first and matures in step with the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before the female is ready.
• Restraint. Males that dump enormous quantities of pollen all at once are frequently the least desirable genetically; breeders prefer moderate shedders.
• Stability. Any male that also shows female flowers under normal stress is discarded without exception; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong scent suggests it carries the terpene traits that are worth passing on.

Thinking in Numbers

A error new regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances 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 value of growing it is to observe the range and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable differences: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

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

• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or several picked females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the traits of the two specific plants and show less spread than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is made.
• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling again to one of its original parents to lock in a particular trait. It tightens the range quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Let each male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.

Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized production requires.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people keeping them treat the population as the whole point, and reversing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not in a small room. There will be also aromas and chemistry that no longer exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of origin and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above makes regular seed into the right option for everyone, and pretending that it is does the category no service.

A grower with space for three plants who wants each one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space ruins everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a specific famous cut repeated 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 new; for anyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or neither is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.