Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: smaller every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking group of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the paperback rack next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is intended 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 gives up by never growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a copy.

The Other Half of the Genome

The easy account of a male cannabis plant is "a pollen source", and for 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 time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less visibly since it never grows a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed invest as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized line inherits and cannot repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not provide a second set of selected traits.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a single popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each generation of that process cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after a couple of generations what is left is essentially one plant repeated 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 emerge: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the original line but not in the selected clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with variations of a dozen clones, and a anyone wanting to make something different discovers there is little remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and that reservoir only exists as long as people keep growing it.

Selecting the Plant Nobody Writes About

Guides on selecting females are everywhere; guidance on choosing males is scarce, because most growers never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower making seed, the following are the signs breeders watch for.

• Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under normal stress is discarded outright; the trait is the one thing worth breeding into a line.
• Timing. A male that declares sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is far more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is receptive.
• Restraint. Males that release enormous amounts of pollen early are often also the less selected genetically; many breeders favour steady shedders.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it carries the resin traits worth keeping.
• Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and branching that matches the intended female shape are inherited; a stretched, floppy male hands that on too.

Thinking in Numbers

A error new regular-seed growers fall into is treating a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the value of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to evaluate and five males to cull or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for noticeable differences: 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 strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot supply: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

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

• Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its original parents to fix a particular quality. It narrows the range fast and is used when a single plant has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mostly vigour.
• Open pollination. Let every male reach each female. It keeps the full range of the line, produces a generous volume of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
• Selected cross. One picked male to one or a few picked females, every other plant else removed. The offspring carry the qualities of two selected plants and express less spread than the original pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a new line is built.

All three require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines have never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis was grown over centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the breeders maintaining them treat the population as the whole value, and reversing a single clone would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, extended flowering periods in tropical lines, tall plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a small room. Expect too flavours and effects that do not appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been reproduced from the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the product no service.

A grower with room for three plants who needs every 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 small space ruins everything within days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who wants a known famous cut reproduced exactly is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the back shelf is safely left where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds sends every order in plain packaging with the breeder's packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in many places buying seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under local rules or both is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer's job, and no part of this article should be read as legal advice.