July 29, 2020
As with most plants, animals, and other life forms, marijuana 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 cannabis, it relates to plants that develop male and female flowers.
The sex of a crop does not always matter, but with marijuana grows, knowing the gender and the sex of your plant is vital to both growers and breeders. The type of weed is crucial to the quality and value of the end product. Seedless buds are worth more than lower-quality cannabis, for example.
Only the female marijuana 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.
Unplanted, regular seeds will typically possess a 50/50 chance of producing a male or female plant. Most seed banks and companies offer genetically altered feminized seeds, which diminishes some of the risks of pollination if a male phenotype lacking resinous buds gets mixed in.
If a male plant sneaks into your marijuana grow tent , it can contaminate the healthy females and fertilize them. This is not good when you’ve dedicated so much time, money, and effort into the cultivating process. When a female plant is pollinated, it will start producing seeds rather than focusing its energy on growing robust flower.
By eliminating the issue early on and quickly removing a male from the garden, you can ensure that your result is healthy female plants.
Keep reading to discover how to differentiate between male and female plants.
Male plants essentially produce pollen which is needed for cannabis 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 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 weed 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 cannabis, 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.
Some growers in search of high performance buds remove all the male plants from the grow room to prevent a transfer of energy. Once the pollen sac ruptures, and females are pollinated, they will convert all the energy that would have gone to flower production into seed production. This makes for a lower cannabinoid concentration in the buds and low yield if this is your end goal for harvest time.
However, seed production is still very important as cannabis and hemp are both annual plants. This mean they grow from seed, flower, and die all within a year. Where as perennial plants like trees grow from a seed and have many years of fruit or crop production throughout their life. This is why hemp/cannabis seeds are still very valuable and are becoming more of a mainstream crop.
These seeds are sought out not only for cannabis growers and hybridization, but also for the food industry. More and more frequently, hemp seeds are being used in kitchens and restaurants across the world for their high protein and fat content. They add a little more nutrition to each plate or smoothy.
Whatever your harvesting goals are, the ability to tell the male and female plants apart can go a long way.
Nowadays more and more people would prefer to grow their own plants indoors. In order to thrive and grow, every cannabis plant needs: Light, Growing Medium , Air, Temperature, Nutrients and water. As for the light, here we would like to recommend the LED grow lights.
LEDs are much more powerful than CFLs or any other fluorescent lighting. They are top-tier grow lights on par with HID lighting (HPS, LEC) when it comes to how much bud they can produce. They’re visually attractive and tend to be more appealing to growers because they’re not as ‘old-fashioned’ (though they tend to cost more). In fact, LEDs are the only grow lights for weed that have seen major technological research and development in the past 10 years.
LED grow lights work for weed great for growing cannabis and some companies have been refining their models for years (the combination of parts is almost like a company’s recipe). Each LED model is different and needs to be kept a different distance away from your plants. It can sometimes be hard to find any “standard” advice about growing with LEDs, yet these days there are quite a few brands which are well-tested and trusted by cannabis growers and these brands tend to have good support for questions. When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to just ask the manufacturer about how far away the lights should be kept, as that’s where new growers are most likely to mess up.
Hopefully, this guide has helped you better understand the differences between male and female marijuana plants. A dream yield of healthy, robust female buds is the objective for nearly all growers. Learning the basics is the first step in becoming a master cannabis cultivator.
A male cannabis plant has very little value if your primary goal is producing potent nugs with high THC content. Male cannabis is, of course, crucial if you’re doing something like cross-breeding to develop a new strain, but in general, it’s 100% females that you want.
August 19, 2020
August 19, 2020