Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced 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 read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line started as a regular one, each new cross requires a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry 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 sets out the argument for that half-male pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by never seeing one, and how to get value 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 for a flower grower that is all it. To a breeder it is half the genome of every seed which follows, and half is chosen with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the terpene profile exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those qualities less since it never grows a smokable flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and cannot replicate. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

A great deal of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that process halves the remaining genetic variation, and after two generations what is left is close to one plant expressed in marginally different ways.

That is fine for a grower who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone downstream. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the parent line but not in the selected clone vanish out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with variations of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to make something different finds there is little left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that replenishes the pool, and it can only exists as long as people grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is rare, because most people do not keep one long enough to judge. For anyone making seed, these are the signs breeders look for.

• Restraint. Males that dump enormous amounts of pollen all at once are frequently also the least selected genetically; breeders favour steady producers.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a strong scent indicates it carries the resin genes worth passing on.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers in step with the females is 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 passed on; a lanky, weak-stemmed male hands that down too.

Thinking in Numbers

A mistake new regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 chances 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 range and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: 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 male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a line of chosen parents that are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning selected parents is only worth something if producing the next generation, and there the options multiply. The main approaches account for most of what home breeders do.

• Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of the two specific plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Done over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a new line is made.
• Open pollination. Allow every 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 correct method when the aim is preservation rather than improvement.
• Backcross. Cross a selected seedling back to one of its parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is used when one plant shows something worth keeping and the other brought mainly vigour.

All three require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. None of them calls for the chemical reversal that feminized seed-making does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines were never feminized and probably never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the early decades of modern breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people keeping them regard the population as the whole value, and selfing a single clone would destroy precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. Expect wide variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect too flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of origin and the generation it has been reproduced from the first collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

None of the above makes regular seed into the right choice for everyone, and pretending that it is does the category no service.

A grower with room for three plants who needs each one of them to finish is far better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day around the onset of flower, since a late male in a confined space seeds the whole crop within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And a buyer who wants a specific clone-only cut reproduced 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 select, to hold onto and at some point to produce something new; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in unmarked packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places buying seeds is lawful as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under licence or both is. Checking the position in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s job, and no part of this article is legal advice.