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 next to it, and picked up by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are looking for. It is easy to see that as the end of a technology. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every feminized line started as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that survives at all survives only because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is intended to be a population, not a one plant. This article makes the case for that half-male pack: what the male is for, what a buyer gives up by never seeing 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 which follows, and half is selected with the same care as the mother.

A male passes on growth habit, vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, resin production and the aromatic profile exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those traits less since it does not produce a finished flower. Those who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time choosing males as females, which is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and can never replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a different set of selected genes.

The Narrowing

Much of the feminized catalogue is built from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every generation of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two rounds what is left is close to one plant repeated in slightly different forms.

That is acceptable for a grower who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Hidden faults emerge: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Qualities that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone vanish from the gene pool altogether. A decade of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder trying to create something different discovers there is little left to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and it only persist as long as people grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Articles on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on choosing males is rare, because most people never keep one long enough to look. For a grower producing seed, the following are the marks breeders watch for.

• Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and branching that matches the desired female shape are inherited; a lanky, floppy male passes that down too.
• Restraint. Males that dump enormous quantities of pollen early are often the least desirable in other respects; many breeders favour steady shedders.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time forms female flowers under ordinary stress is rejected outright; that trait is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a strong scent suggests it holds the terpene genes worth keeping.
• Timing. A male that shows sex first and flowers at the same pace as the females is more useful than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is ready.

Thinking in Numbers

A error first-time regular-seed buyers fall into is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the range and select from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to evaluate and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, look for real variation: height, finishing time, aroma, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the strongest female and male now owns something a feminized pack can never supply: a pair of chosen parents that are theirs.

Three Ways to Cross

Owning chosen parents means making the next generation, and there the choices open up. Three methods cover most of what home breeders attempt.

• Selected cross. One chosen male to one or a few chosen females, everything else removed. The seeds carry the traits of two selected plants and express narrower variation than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable selection, this is how a stable line is built.
• Backcross. Take a selected seedling again to one of its original parents to lock in a specific quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when one parent shows something worth keeping and the other brought mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow each male pollinate every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, produces a generous quantity of seed, and does no selection at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained going, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation rather than refinement.

All three need only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a small bag, and patience. None of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production does.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them treat diversity as the whole value, and selfing a single plant would destroy precisely what makes the line worth keeping.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from running a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, tall plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not in a tent. There will be too flavours and effects that do not exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds holds a dedicated landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its region of collection and the generation it has been reproduced from the original collection.

When the Library Is the Wrong Shop

Nothing of the above turns regular seed the best choice for everyone, and claiming otherwise does the product no favours.

A grower with space for three plants who wants every one of them to finish is better off with feminized seed. So is a grower who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day around the start of flower, since a late male in a confined space ruins the whole crop inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a population they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a specific clone-only plant repeated exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who wants to select, to hold onto and at some point to produce something of their own; for everyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored where it is.

Before You Buy

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the original packs sealed inside and nothing on the exterior to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is legal as genetic preservation while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under local rules or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.