Browse 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 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 bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines that trace to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not growing one, and how to work with a population rather than a copy.

Not Just Pollen

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 selected with the same attention as the female.

A male contributes structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile just as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less since it never produce a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized line borrows and cannot repeat. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it does not give a different line of selected traits.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, treated and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after two rounds what is left is close to one plant repeated in slightly different forms.

That is acceptable for a grower who needs that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the population altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with variations of a dozen clones, and a breeder wanting to create something different finds there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and that reservoir only persist if people grows it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Articles on choosing females are everywhere; advice on choosing males is rare, because most growers 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.

  • Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear aroma indicates it holds the resin genes that are worth keeping.
  • Restraint. Plants that dump huge quantities of pollen all at once are frequently also the least selected in other respects; many breeders prefer moderate shedders.
  • Structure. Tight internodes, a thick main stem and branching that matches the desired female habit are passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
  • Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under ordinary conditions is rejected without exception; that tendency is the one thing worth carrying into a line.

Thinking in Numbers

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 real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to see the spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or judge for breeding. Within the females, expect noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, smell, density, tolerance. This variation is not a failure in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents which are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents means producing the next generation, and there the options multiply. Three methods cover most of what small-scale breeders attempt.

  • Open pollination. Allow every male reach each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and involves no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the aim is preservation not improvement.
  • Backcross. Take a selected offspring back to one of its parents to lock in a particular quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when a single plant shows something worth concentrating and the second contributed mostly vigour.
  • Selected cross. One picked male to one or several picked females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the qualities of the two specific plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.

All three require only a separate space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

Some lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old hybrids from the early decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard the population as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be also flavours and effects that no longer appear in the commercial market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its origin of origin and the generation it has been reproduced since the first collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

None of the above turns regular seed the right option for everyone, and claiming that it is does the category no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who needs each one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. So is a grower unable to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot select from. And anyone who wants a known famous plant repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to keep and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored alone.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others both are permitted under licence or both is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.