Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked cheaper than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who know exactly what they are after. It is tempting to see that as the end of a technology. It is closer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross requires a male somewhere in its pedigree, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone kept regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines that trace to the 1980s, sold in packs of 10 seeds because a pack is meant to be a population, not a one plant. This article sets out the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a grower loses by never growing one, and how to work with a pack rather than a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is selected with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on structure, hybrid vigour, flowering speed, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it just expresses some of those traits less visibly because it never produce a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend at least as much time selecting males as females, and this is the effort that a feminized cross inherits and cannot repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it cannot provide a different set of selected traits.

How Diversity Leaks Away

Much of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one famous clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each generation of that selfing halves the remaining genetic variation, and after two rounds what is left is essentially one plant expressed across marginally different ways.

That is fine for a grower who needs that one plant. It is a loss for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but not in the chosen clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A generation of this leaves a market crowded with versions of the same few clones, and a breeder trying to create something different discovers there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the store that refills the market, and that reservoir only persist as long as people keep growing it.

How to Judge a Male

Articles on selecting females are everywhere; advice on picking males is scarce, because most people do not keep one long enough to look. For anyone making seed, the following are the marks breeders look for.

• Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers in step with the females is far more workable than a very early one that releases pollen before the female is receptive.
• Stability. Any male that at the same time shows female pistils under normal stress is discarded outright; that tendency is the one thing worth carrying into a line.
• Restraint. Males that dump huge amounts of pollen all at once are frequently also the least desirable genetically; breeders prefer moderate producers.
• Structure. Short internodes, a thick main stem and branching that resembles the intended female shape are passed on; a stretched, weak-stemmed male passes that on too.
• Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower cluster and smell it. A male with trichomes on its sepals and a clear aroma indicates it holds the terpene genes worth passing on.

Thinking in Numbers

The mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 attempts at the same plant. It is the opposite. A pack from a real outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of running it is to observe the range and choose from it.

Roughly half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, expect noticeable variation: stature, flowering time, aroma, density, tolerance. This variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who keeps the strongest female and the best male has something a feminized pack cannot offer: a line of selected parents that are their own.

Making Your Own Seed

Owning selected parents means producing the next generation, and there the options multiply. Three approaches cover most of what small-scale breeders do.

• Open pollination. Let each male pollinate each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, produces a large volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept alive, and it is the right method when the aim is preservation rather than refinement.
• Backcross. Cross a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a particular trait. It narrows the range quickly and is useful when one parent shows something worth keeping and the second contributed mainly vigour.
• Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, everything else culled. The seeds carry the qualities of the two specific plants and show less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent choices, this is how a new line is made.

All three require nothing more than a separate space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one 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 places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old hybrids from the first decades of modern breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them regard diversity 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 growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, extended flowering times in tropical lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a small room. There will be too flavours and chemistry that do not appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line marked with its region of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

None of the above makes regular seed the right choice for everyone, and claiming that it is would the product no favours.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs every one of them to flower is better served with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants every day during the start of flower, because a missed male in a confined space ruins the whole crop inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who is after a known clone-only plant repeated as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a regular cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to keep and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the back shelf is safely ignored alone.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the exterior to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, because seed importation is restricted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in many places owning seeds is legal as collectables 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 responsibility, and no part of this article is legal advice.