Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: smaller every year, priced lower than the feminized packs next to it, and picked up 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 see it as a library shrinking while the paperback rack next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, every new cross requires a male somewhere in its history, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists because someone kept regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry 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 grower loses by not growing one, and how to get value with a population instead of a clone.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy description of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and to 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 chosen with the same attention as the female.

A male passes on growth habit, hybrid vigour, flowering time, resistance to mould and pests, trichome density and the terpene chemistry just as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less visibly because it does not produce a finished flower. Breeders who breed with regular seed spend as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female yields pollen; it does not give a second set of selected genes.

How Diversity Leaks Away

A great deal of the feminized market is built from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, treated and crossed with itself. Each round of that process halves the remaining genetic variation, and after two rounds what remains is essentially one plant expressed in marginally different forms.

This is acceptable for a consumer who wants that single plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Hidden faults surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Qualities that were present in the original line but absent in the selected clone disappear from the gene pool entirely. A generation of such breeding produces a market crowded with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder trying to make something new discovers there is nothing remaining to cross. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that replenishes the market, and it only persist as long as somebody grows it.

Reading a Male Plant

Guides on choosing females are easy to find; advice on choosing males is rare, since most people never keep one past the first week of flower to look. For a grower making seed, these are the marks breeders look for.

• Restraint. Plants that dump huge quantities of pollen all at once are often the least selected in other respects; many breeders favour moderate producers.
• Stability. A male that at the same time shows female flowers under normal conditions is rejected outright; the trait is the last thing anyone wants breeding into a line.
• Resin on the stem. Scratch a stem or a pollen sac and smell it. A male with resin on its flower parts and a clear scent indicates it holds the resin traits that are worth passing on.
• Timing. A male that shows sex early and flowers at the same pace as the females is more workable than an early one that releases pollen before any female is receptive.

What 10 Seeds Actually Give You

The error first-time regular-seed buyers make is treating a pack as 10 attempts at the same 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 spread and select from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds gives something like five females to compare and five males to either discard or assess for breeding. Among the females, look for real variation: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. This spread is not a failure 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 chosen parents that are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

Holding chosen parents is only worth something if making the next batch, and here the options open up. Three methods cover most of what home breeders do.

• Backcross. Take a selected offspring again to one of its original parents to fix a specific quality. It narrows the genetics fast and is used when a single plant shows something worth keeping and the other contributed mainly vigour.
• Open pollination. Allow every male reach each female. It keeps the full diversity of the line, produces a large quantity of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how landrace lines are kept going, and it is the correct approach when the goal is preservation not refinement.
• Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else culled. The offspring inherit the qualities of two specific plants and express less spread than the parent pack. Repeated over several rounds with consistent selection, this is how a new line is made.

All three require nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a paper bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

Landraces and Heirloom Lines

Some lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed because the people maintaining them treat the population as the entire value, and reversing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of preserving.

Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. There will be wide variation, long flowering periods in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that make sense in a field but not under a small room. There will be too flavours and effects that do not appear in the commercial market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of collection and the number of generations it has been grown out since the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

Nothing of the above makes regular seed the best option for everyone, and claiming otherwise would the product no favours.

A grower with space for a handful of plants who wants every one of them to finish is better served with feminized seed. So is anyone who cannot afford to check the plants every day during the onset of flower, because a missed male in a confined space seeds everything inside days. Someone growing a single autoflower on a balcony gets no use from a pack they cannot select from. And anyone 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 intends to select, to hold onto and at some point to make something new; for everyone else the regular shelf is best left alone.

Ordering and the Law

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain parcels 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 import is restricted there. Seed law varies widely 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 permitted under licence or both is. Checking the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.