Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, priced lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is closer to the truth to see it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door expands. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that exists at all survives only because somebody kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers 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 makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male is for, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a population rather than a clone.

The Other Half of the Genome

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is „the one that makes pollen“, and to a flower grower that is all it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and half is selected with the same care as the mother.

A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it just shows several of those qualities less because it never produce a smokable flower. Those who work with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, which is the work that a feminized cross borrows and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female yields pollen; it does not provide a second line of selected genes.

The Narrowing

A great deal of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Every generation of that selfing cuts in half the surviving genetic variation, and after a couple of rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed in slightly different forms.

This is fine for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses emerge: intersex tendencies, brittle stems, susceptibility to a particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the chosen clone vanish out of the population entirely. A decade of this leaves a market full with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder wanting to create something different finds there is little left to work with. Regular seed from an outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and it can only persist if somebody grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on choosing females are everywhere; guidance on picking males is rare, since most people 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.

• Restraint. Plants that release enormous quantities of pollen all at once are frequently the less desirable genetically; many breeders favour steady shedders.
• Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before any female is ready.
• Structure. Tight internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that matches the intended female habit are passed on; a stretched, floppy male hands that down too.
• Stability. Any male that also forms female pistils under ordinary stress is rejected without exception; that tendency is the last thing worth carrying into a line.

Thinking in Numbers

The mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the one plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice 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 evaluate and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable variation: height, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never supply: a line of selected parents which are theirs.

From One Pack to the Next

Owning chosen parents means making the next generation, and here the choices open up. Three methods account for most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring back to one of its original parents to lock in a specific quality. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when one plant has something worth concentrating and the other contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male on one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the traits of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Done over generations with stable choices, this is how a stable line is built.
• Open pollination. Allow each male reach every female. It preserves the full diversity of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation not refinement.

Each of these need only a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized seed-making requires.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

Some lines were never been feminized and probably never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed because the breeders maintaining them regard the population as the entire value, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is a different experience from running a modern hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that make sense in a field but not under a small room. Expect also aromas and chemistry that do not exist in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of origin and the number of generations it has been grown out from the original collection.

Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds

Nothing of the above turns regular seed into the best choice for everyone, and claiming that it is would the product no service.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better off with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to check the plants each day during the start of flower, because a late male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a population they cannot select from. And a buyer who is after a known famous cut 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 wants to choose, to keep and eventually to produce something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is safely ignored where it is.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in unmarked parcels with the breeder’s packs sealed inside and no on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law differs sharply by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are allowed under local rules or neither is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.