Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are looking for. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because somebody held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by never growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The easy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and that half is chosen with the same care as the mother.

A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it simply shows some of those traits less visibly because it never grows a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time selecting males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line borrows and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a different line of selected traits.

The Narrowing

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 halves the remaining genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what is left is close to one plant expressed in slightly different forms.

That is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but absent in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market crowded with variations of the same few plants, and a breeder trying to create something new discovers there is nothing left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and that reservoir can only persist if people grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Guides on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most people do not keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
• Restraint. Plants that dump huge quantities of pollen early are often also the less desirable in other respects; many breeders favour moderate producers.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal stress is rejected outright; that tendency is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong aroma indicates it carries the resin genes worth passing on.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

A mistake 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 genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the spread and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to compare and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable differences: height, flowering time, aroma, density, resistance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents that are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Selected cross. One picked male to one or a few picked females, every other plant else culled. The offspring carry the traits of two selected plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the range fast and is useful when a single parent shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mostly vigour.

Each of these require only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars

Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders keeping them regard diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single plant would erase precisely what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not under a tent. Expect too aromas and chemistry that do not appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been reproduced since the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

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

A grower with room for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, because a missed male in a small space ruins the whole crop inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a specific famous plant repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to hold onto and eventually to produce something of their own; for everyone else the back shelf is best ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or both is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article is legal advice.