August 04, 2020
As with most plants, animals, and other life forms, medicinal plants have distinct genders. They can have either male or female reproductive parts. In rare cases, you will find hermaphrodite plants. These are plants with male and female traits. In medicinal plants, it relates to plants that develop male and female flowers.
The sex of a crop does not always matter.But since growers and breeders have put lots of efforts in it ,choosing the best equipment (indoor grow lights), with medicinal plants grows, knowing the gender and the sex of your plant is vital to them ,because the type of medicinal plants is crucial to the quality and value of the end product.
Only the female medicinal plants crop is capable of producing potent buds. Additionally, it is useless to sell product from male plants, as they will not provide much of a high. So it's vital to know the difference between them, whether you’re planning on crossbreeding strains, maximising the yield of your female plants, or studying each of the types.
How to determine the sex of a medicinal plants
Medicinal plants show their sex by what grows in between their nodes (where leaves and branches extend from the stalk). Pollen sacs will develop on a male plant to spread seeds and stigma will develop on a female to catch pollen. You can see these differences weeks before they actually start serving their purposes in the reproduction cycle. These are known as “pre-flowers.”
Pre-flowers begin to develop four weeks into growth, but they may take a little longer depending on how quickly the sprouting phase occurs. By the sixth week, you should be able to find the pre-flowers and confidently determine the sex of your plant.
Pre-flowers can initially be extremely small and hard to identify with the naked eye, but you can use a magnifying glass to get a better look. Examine the nodes of the plant and look for either the early growth of small sacs on a male, or two bracts on a female, which will eventually produce the hair-like stigma.
Male medicinal plants
Male plants essentially produce pollen which is needed for medicinal plants to naturally reproduce; seeds occur when there are male plants in the mix. If you want to make your own seeds you will need a male plant. However, if you’re growing regular plants in your own grow room/ indoor grow tent and want to harvest flowers, we recommend getting rid of any males as soon as possible. You won’t be able to tell them apart until they begin to flower, which is when plants begin to show their sex. Male medicinal plants grow “balls” that open up to let their pollen out, ending up looking like a small bunch of flowers. You’ll need to get rid of them way before this happens. If they manage to release their pollen it’ll be too late. They can take up to three weeks to burst. If you’re still not sure how to tell them apart, male flowers do not have any pistils on them at all.
Female plants are basically what everyone is after when growing medicinal plants, as these are the ones that make buds, which is the part of the plant that contains the most THC. With just one male plant and a miniscule amount of pollen, your plants might end up filling their flowers with seeds. If you have male and female plants in the same growing area, the buds grown there will only produce seeds so you won’t be able to smoke any of it. You can tell females apart due to the fact that their flowers don’t fully close, they’re actually quite open and they produce little hairs called pistils. They’re incredibly easy to recognize, as the first thing they produce are their pistils, which male plants do not have at all.
It may seem confusing, but it really isn’t hard to tell male and female medicinal plants apart; they are quite different. Planting regular seeds has its benefits, as well as feminized has its inconveniences; you can get much larger yields with feminized plants as you’re guaranteed no male plants.
August 19, 2020
August 19, 2020