Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and picked up by a shrinking group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives 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 since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a copy.

Not Just Pollen

The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the female.

A male contributes growth habit, vigour, flowering speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses some of those qualities less visibly since it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not give a different line of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is close to one plant expressed in slightly different ways.

That is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of this leaves a market full with versions of a dozen plants, and a anyone wanting to make something different finds there is little left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and it can only persist if people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most growers never keep one long enough to look. For anyone making seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.

• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong scent suggests it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures in step with the females is more workable than an early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and branching that resembles the intended female habit are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that on too.
• Restraint. Plants that dump enormous quantities of pollen all at once are often the less desirable in other respects; breeders favour moderate producers.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female flowers under ordinary stress is discarded outright; that trait is the last thing anyone wants carrying into a line.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

A mistake new regular-seed growers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. 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 choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable differences: height, finishing time, smell, density, tolerance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of selected parents which are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the choices open up. The main methods cover most of what home breeders attempt.

• Open pollination. Allow every male pollinate each female. It keeps the whole diversity of the line, makes a large volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation not refinement.
• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few chosen females, every other plant else removed. The seeds inherit the qualities of the two specific plants and show narrower variation than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the range fast and is used when a single plant shows something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.

Each of these need only a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines have never feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the breeders keeping them treat the population as the entire point, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. Expect also flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the original collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above turns regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the product no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to inspect the plants each day around the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins everything within days. A person growing a single autoflower on a balcony has no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a known famous cut reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and eventually to produce something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is best ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends each order in plain parcels with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under licence or both is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.