Browse 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 bought by a dwindling group 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 started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back 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 argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by never seeing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a copy.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy account of a male cannabis plant is “the one that makes pollen”, and to a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply shows several of those traits less visibly since it does not grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the work that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that process halves the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of generations what is left is close to one plant repeated in slightly different forms.

That is acceptable for a consumer who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive faults emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of the same few plants, and a anyone wanting to make something new finds there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the pool, and it only persist as long as somebody grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on choosing females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is rare, because most growers do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.

• Stability. A male that at the same time shows female pistils under ordinary stress is discarded outright; that tendency is the one thing worth carrying forward.
• Restraint. Males that release enormous quantities of pollen early are frequently the less selected in other respects; breeders favour moderate shedders.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong scent indicates it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is ready.
• Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that resembles the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, floppy male passes that down too.

Thinking in Numbers

A 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 slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly 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 assess for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: stature, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of selected parents that are their own.

From One Pack to the Next

Owning chosen parents means making the next generation, and there the options open up. Three methods account for most of what home breeders attempt.

• Backcross. Take a chosen seedling back to one of its parents to lock in a particular quality. It tightens the range fast and is useful when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the second brought mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or several picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring inherit the traits of the two specific plants and express less variation than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Allow each male reach each female. It keeps the full range of the line, produces a generous quantity 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 rather than improvement.

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 seed-making requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis was grown for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people keeping them regard diversity as the whole point, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect also flavours and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above makes regular seed into the best option for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the category no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who wants every one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the start of flower, since a missed male in a confined space seeds the whole crop inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known famous plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and eventually to produce something new; for everyone else the back shelf is best ignored alone.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the exterior to indicate 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 both are permitted under licence or neither is. Checking the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.