Walk 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 picked up by a dwindling group of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to see that as obsolescence. It is nearer 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, every new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not growing one, and how to work with a population instead of a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

The easy description 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 that follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the mother.

A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene profile just as the female does; it just shows some of those qualities less because it never produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed invest as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected genes.

The Narrowing

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is close to one plant expressed across slightly different forms.

This is acceptable for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the selected clone disappear out of the population entirely. A generation of this produces a market full with variations of a dozen plants, and a anyone trying to make something different finds there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the pool, and it can only exists if somebody grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is rare, since most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower making seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear scent indicates it holds the terpene genes that are worth keeping.
• Restraint. Males that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are frequently also the least desirable in other respects; breeders prefer steady producers.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is far more useful than an early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
• Structure. Short internodes, a strong main stem and a frame that matches the intended female shape are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that down too.
• Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal conditions is discarded without exception; the trait is the one thing worth carrying forward.

Thinking in Numbers

The error new regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the spread and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for noticeable differences: stature, finishing time, smell, density, resistance. That spread is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and there the choices multiply. The main approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, everything else removed. The offspring carry the traits of the two specific plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.
• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when a single plant shows something worth keeping and the other brought mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It preserves the full range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the correct method when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.

Each of these need nothing more than a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the people keeping them regard diversity as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. Expect also aromas and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its region of origin and the generation it has been reproduced since the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

Nothing of the above makes regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is would the product no service.

A grower with room for three plants who wants every one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone unable to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, since a late male in a small space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a known famous plant repeated exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to choose, to keep and at some point to produce something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain packaging with the original packs sealed inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others both are allowed under local rules or neither is. Knowing the rules where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.