Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the 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 after. It is tempting to see that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door expands. Every female-only line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a copy.

Not Just Pollen

The easy account 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 half is selected with the same care as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation speed, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply shows several of those traits less because it does not produce a smokable flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross borrows and can never replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a second set of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Each round of that selfing halves the surviving genetic diversity, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant repeated across slightly different ways.

This is acceptable for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to a particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the selected clone vanish from the population altogether. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, 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 market, and that reservoir can only persist if somebody keep growing it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is scarce, because most growers never keep one past the first week of flower to judge. For anyone making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.

• Stability. A male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary conditions is discarded without exception; the trait is the one thing anyone wants carrying into a line.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that resembles the intended female shape are inherited; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.
• Timing. A male that shows sex early and matures at the same pace as the females is more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before the female is receptive.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it carries the resin genes that are worth passing on.

A Pack Is a Population

The mistake first-time regular-seed buyers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the spread and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to either cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for real variation: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, resistance. This 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 can never offer: a pair of selected parents which are their own.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning selected parents is only worth something if producing the next batch, and here the options multiply. The main approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring inherit the traits of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is made.
• Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a specific trait. It tightens the genetics quickly and is useful when a single parent has something worth concentrating and the second brought mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.

Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

Some lines were never feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the whole point, and selfing a single plant would destroy exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be too aromas and effects that do not exist in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out from the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best option for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the category no favours.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants each one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a confined space ruins everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a known clone-only plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to hold onto and at some point to produce something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is best left where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain 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, as seed import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places buying seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under licence or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.