Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced 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 tempting to see that as obsolescence. 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, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never growing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a clone.

Not Just Pollen

The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is « the one that makes pollen », and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the female.

A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less visibly because it never grows a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every round of that selfing halves the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is close to one plant expressed across slightly different forms.

This is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but absent in the chosen clone disappear out of the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding leaves a market crowded with versions of the same few clones, and a anyone trying to make something new discovers there is little left to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and it only persist if somebody grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is rare, because most growers 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.

• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong main stem and branching that resembles the intended female habit are passed on; a lanky, floppy male passes that down too.
• Stability. A male that also shows female flowers under normal conditions is discarded outright; that trait is the one thing worth breeding forward.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
• Restraint. Plants that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are often the less selected in other respects; many breeders favour moderate producers.

Thinking in Numbers

The mistake new regular-seed growers 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 value of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: stature, finishing time, smell, density, resistance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of chosen parents that are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and there the choices multiply. Three methods cover most of what home breeders do.

• Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It preserves the whole range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, everything else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of the two specific plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is built.
• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the range fast and is used when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.

All three require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis was grown over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people keeping them treat the population as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be also flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of collection and the generation it has been grown out from the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above makes regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming that it is does the category no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who wants every one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, because a late male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a population they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a known famous plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and eventually to make something new; for anyone else the back shelf is safely left alone.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.