Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked 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 easy 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 bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is the whole of it. For 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 passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply shows some of those qualities less visibly because it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different set of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that selfing halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what remains is close to one plant repeated across slightly different forms.

This is acceptable for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of this leaves a market crowded with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it can only exists as long as people keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is rare, since most people do not keep one long enough to look. For anyone producing seed, these are the signs breeders look for.

• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and branching that resembles the desired female shape are passed on; a lanky, floppy male hands that down too.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal stress is discarded without exception; that tendency is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it holds the resin traits that are worth passing on.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The mistake first-time regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of running it is to see 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 evaluate and five males to discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable differences: height, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male now owns something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of chosen parents which are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding selected parents means producing the next batch, and there the options multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else culled. The offspring carry the traits of the two specific plants and express less variation than the parent pack. Done over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring back to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the range quickly and is useful when one plant shows something worth keeping and the second brought mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Let every male pollinate every female. It preserves the whole range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained going, and it is the correct approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.

All three need only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

A number of lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from regions where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the entire point, and selfing a single clone would erase precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a small room. Expect also flavours and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out from the original collection.

The Honest Exclusions

None of the above turns regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming 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. The same is anyone unable to inspect the plants each day during the start of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a known famous plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to produce something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under local rules or both is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.