Browse 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 bought by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because somebody 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 intended to be a population, not a single plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by not growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

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

A male contributes growth habit, vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry just as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less because it does not grows a finished flower. Those who work with regular seed invest at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized cross borrows and can never replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is essentially one plant repeated in slightly different ways.

That is fine for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding leaves a market crowded with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to make something new finds there is little left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it can only exists as long as somebody grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is scarce, because most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to look. For anyone making seed, these are the marks breeders watch for.

• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac 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.
• Stability. A male that at the same time forms female pistils under ordinary conditions is discarded outright; the tendency is the last thing anyone wants carrying forward.
• Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the intended female habit are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that on too.
• Timing. A male that declares sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is ready.

A Pack Is a Population

A error first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the spread and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable variation: stature, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. This spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of chosen parents that are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Holding selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and here the options open up. The main approaches cover most of what home breeders do.

• Open pollination. Let each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring again to one of its original parents to lock in a specific trait. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when one parent shows something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or a few picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring carry the traits of the two specific plants and show less spread than the original pack. Done over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.

All three require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and patience. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines were 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 modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the breeders keeping them regard diversity 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 large variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a field but not in a small room. Expect also aromas 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 number of generations it has been grown out since 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 product no favours.

A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day around the onset of flower, since a missed male in a confined space ruins the whole crop within days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a specific clone-only cut reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and at some point to make something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is best left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs intact inside and no on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or neither is. Knowing the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.