Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives because someone kept regular seed. Specialists 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 one plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by never seeing one, and how to get value with a pack rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

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

A male contributes structure, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less visibly because it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and can never repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not give a second line of selected traits.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what is left is close to one plant repeated in marginally different ways.

That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Recessive faults emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to make something new finds there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and that reservoir can only exists as long as somebody keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is scarce, since most growers do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone producing seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.

• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the desired female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that on too.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong aroma indicates it carries the resin genes that are worth passing on.
• Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
• Stability. Any male that also forms female pistils under ordinary conditions is rejected outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Restraint. Males that release huge quantities of pollen early are frequently the less desirable genetically; breeders favour steady producers.

Thinking in Numbers

The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances 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 growing it is to see the spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: height, flowering time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the options open up. Three methods cover most of what home breeders attempt.

• Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to lock in a specific trait. It tightens the genetics fast and is used when one parent shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate each female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else culled. The offspring carry the qualities of two specific plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable selection, this is how a new line is built.

All three require only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and heirloom crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them regard diversity as the entire point, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not in a tent. Expect also flavours and effects that no longer exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of collection and the generation it has been reproduced since the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above makes regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and pretending that it is would the category no favours.

A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to check the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds everything within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a specific clone-only plant reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and eventually to produce something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is legal as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or both is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.