Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door grows. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by not seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

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 that half is chosen with the same care as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome production and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less visibly because it never produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a different set of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each generation of that process halves the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

That is fine for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Traits that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the population entirely. A decade of this produces a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder trying to create something different discovers there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the market, and it only persist if people grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is scarce, because most people never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, the following are the signs breeders look for.

• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a strong aroma suggests it carries the terpene genes that are worth passing on.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that resembles the intended female habit are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
• Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen early are often also the less desirable in other respects; breeders prefer steady producers.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal stress is rejected outright; the trait is the last thing worth breeding into a line.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures at the same pace as the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.

A Pack Is a Population

A error first-time regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the value of running it is to observe the range and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields around five females to evaluate and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect real variation: stature, flowering time, aroma, bud structure, resistance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male now owns something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of selected parents which are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and here the choices multiply. Three methods account for most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

• Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds inherit the traits of the two specific plants and show narrower spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It keeps the whole range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation not improvement.
• Backcross. Cross a chosen offspring back to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It tightens the range quickly and is used when a single parent shows something worth concentrating and the other brought mainly vigour.

All three need nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew for centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people maintaining them treat the population as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that made sense in a field but not in a tent. Expect also aromas and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line marked with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out since the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the category no service.

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 who cannot afford to check the plants each day around the start of flower, since a missed male in a confined space ruins everything within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone who is after a specific famous cut repeated as closely as possible is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and eventually to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain parcels with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.