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 next to it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry 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 is for, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a copy.

The Other Half of the Genome

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 that follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the female.

A male contributes growth habit, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those qualities less visibly because it does not produce a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant repeated in slightly different forms.

That is fine for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool entirely. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with variations of the same few plants, and a breeder trying to create something new finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it can only exists if people grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on choosing females are everywhere; advice on picking males is rare, since most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower making seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.

• Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen early are frequently also the least desirable genetically; many breeders favour moderate producers.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and branching that matches the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, floppy male passes that down too.
• Stability. Any male that also shows female pistils under normal stress is rejected outright; the trait is the last thing worth carrying into a line.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a strong scent indicates it holds the resin traits that are worth passing on.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early 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 ready.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is treating 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 value of growing 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 discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect real differences: height, finishing time, aroma, density, resistance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of chosen parents that are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents means making the next generation, and here the options open up. Three methods cover most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a specific trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when a single plant has something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Let each male pollinate every female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of the two specific plants and express narrower spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is made.

Each of these need nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making requires.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines have never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat diversity as the whole value, and reversing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of origin and the generation it has been grown out from the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above turns regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the category no favours.

A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to check the plants each day around the start of flower, because a late male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony has no value from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a known famous cut 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 hold onto and at some point to make something of their own; for everyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or neither is. Knowing the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.