Browse through most seed shops today and the regular section is a shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs next to it, and bought by a dwindling group of people who know exactly what they are after. It is easy to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library losing shelves while the bookshop next door grows. Every feminized line began as a regular one, each new cross needs a male at some point in its pedigree, and the breadth of cannabis genetics that exists at all exists only because somebody held onto regular seed. Dedicated sellers such as https://breederregularseeds.com stock lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer loses by not seeing one, and how to work with a pack instead of a copy.

What a Male Plant Is Actually For

The lazy 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 that follows, and half is selected with the same attention as the mother.

A male contributes growth habit, hybrid vigour, maturation speed, tolerance to mould and pests, resin density and the terpene chemistry exactly as the female does; it just expresses several of those traits less since it does not grows 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 line borrows and cannot replicate. Feminizing a female gives pollen; it cannot give a different set of selected genes.

What Happens When Lines Are Only Selfed

Much of the feminized catalogue is made from S1 seeds: a one popular clone, reversed and crossed with itself. Every generation of that process cuts in half the surviving genetic diversity, and after two generations what is left is close to one plant repeated across slightly different forms.

This is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone downstream. Recessive weaknesses surface: hermaphrodite tendencies, brittle stems, sensitivity to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the original line but not in the selected clone vanish out of the population altogether. A decade of this produces a market full with variations of a dozen plants, and a breeder trying to create something new finds there is nothing remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the pool, and that reservoir only exists as long as people grows it.

How to Judge a Male

Guides on selecting females are everywhere; advice on choosing 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 watch for.

  • Timing. A male that shows sex first and matures in step with the females is more workable than a very early one that sheds pollen before any female is ready.
  • Stability. A male that at the same time shows female flowers under normal stress is rejected without exception; that trait is the last thing worth carrying forward.
  • Structure. Short internodes, a thick central stem and a frame that resembles the desired female shape are passed on; a lanky, floppy male hands that on too.
  • Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a flower sac and smell it. A male with trichomes on its flower parts and a clear scent suggests it holds the resin genes worth passing on.

Thinking in Numbers

The error new regular-seed growers make is treating a pack as 10 chances at the same plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a slice of a population, and the point of growing it is to observe the spread and choose from it.

About half the plants will be male, which means a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to cull or judge for breeding. Among the females, look for real differences: height, finishing time, smell, bud structure, tolerance. That variation is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is for. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of selected parents that are theirs.

Making Your Own Seed

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

  • Backcross. Take a selected seedling back to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It tightens the genetics quickly and is useful when one parent has something worth concentrating and the other brought mostly vigour.
  • Selected cross. One picked male to one or several chosen females, every other plant else culled. The seeds inherit the qualities of two specific plants and show less variation than the parent pack. Repeated over generations with stable choices, this is how a stable line is made.
  • Open pollination. Let every male reach every female. It keeps the whole range of the line, makes a generous quantity of seed, and involves no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are maintained alive, and it is the right method when the goal is preservation rather than improvement.

All three need only a isolated space for the male, a soft brush or a paper bag, and a few weeks. Not one of them calls for the chemical treatment that feminized production requires.

Keeping Old Lines Alive

A number of lines were never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces gathered from places where cannabis grew over centuries, and old crosses from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are available as regular seed since the people maintaining them treat diversity as the whole point, and selfing a single clone would destroy exactly what makes the line worth preserving.

Running a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a commercial hybrid. There will be large variation, long flowering periods in tropical lines, lanky plants, and qualities that made sense in a mountain valley but not in a tent. There will be also flavours and chemistry that no longer appear in the hybrid market at all. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, and each line labelled with its origin of collection and the generation it has been reproduced from the first collection.

The Honest Exclusions

None of the above turns regular seed the right option for everyone, and pretending otherwise would the product no service.

A grower with space for three plants who wants each one of them to finish is far better served with feminized seed. So is anyone unable to inspect the plants every day during the onset of flower, since a late male in a small space seeds everything inside days. A person running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And anyone who is after a specific clone-only cut reproduced exactly is looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to select, to hold onto and eventually to make something of their own; for anyone else the regular shelf is best ignored where it is.

Practicalities

Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches every order in plain parcels with the breeder’s packs intact inside and no on the outside to indicate the contents. Orders to the United States are not taken, as seed importation is not permitted there. Seed law varies 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 licence or both is. Knowing the position where you live is the buyer’s job, and nothing of this article is legal advice.