Cannabis plants are among the most intriguing plants to cultivate. There is so much to learn about them. You may concentrate on how they make the various compounds we like. Maybe you’re interested in how they react to different variables like light and heat.
Perhaps you are interested in growing plants to maximize desired qualities. One thing you might not have considered is the gender of your plants. After all, what is a plant if not a plant? Have you ever wondered if your plant is male or female before it blooms?
Wrong! Cannabis plants can be male, female, or hermaphroditic, and each has an impact on the grade of cannabis harvested.
Seed Supreme will explain why cannabis gender is important.
Male plants are ineffective when it comes to producing high-quality output. They can also harm the quality of what is grown by female plants nearby since they assist in developing seeds. It is, however, difficult to cross-breed plants or generate new strains of cannabis without male plants.
Male cannabis plants have their time and place. It is up to you to determine when that will be. Female marijuana plants are the source of high-quality marijuana buds. Buds may be seeded or seedless.
Because of the natural compounds in the seeds, seeded buds are regarded as harsher and less pleasant. When male cannabis plants are not nearby, female cannabis plants produce seedless buds known as sensimilla.
When we buy marijuana seeds, we seek these characteristics. You could start with feminized seeds, but this reproduction technique makes it impossible to introduce new features into your plant line. In essence, you can’t create new cannabis strains unless you have male plants.
The last type of cannabis plant is the hermaphroditic plant, which develops both male and female sex organs on the same plant. This is rare and is usually the outcome of a stressed-out cannabis plant. If your plants begin to do this, it’s a strong indication that you should inspect them for plant damage, nutrient deficiencies, or illness.
Female plants may be unintentionally fertilized by hermaphroditic plants, resulting in a low-quality crop.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to the cannabis plant gender than meets the eye. The takeaway: it’s critical to determine the gender of your plants as soon as possible. That way, at the end of the season, you’ll get the outcomes you want.
Before flowering, here’s how to know if your plant is male or female:
Signs of a Male Plant
Male and female cannabis plants have sex organs known as flowers; however, the blooms look different. Male plants develop pollen sacks at the nodes slightly above where the leaves join the stalk when they reach maturity. These nodes develop until the plant is mature, at which point they rupture, and the pollen spreads throughout the plant. They remain little throughout their lives, so you must keep a watchful lookout for them.
A jeweler’s glass or small hand-held microscope is one of the best ways to determine if your plant is male or female before blossoming.
These will assist you in identifying pollen sacks early in the plant’s growth. Checking before the plant grows allows you to determine how many male plants to keep.
Signs of a Female Plant
Before flowering, female cannabis plants resemble male cannabis plants almost identically. However, there is one technique to determine if your plant is male or female before blossoming — look for little hairs on female plants.
Female plants develop their sex organs in the same location as male plants, where the leaves join the stalk. On the other hand, female plants produce something called “bracts” instead of a pair of small round balls.
” Wispy white hairs emerge from these bracts.” Before flowering, the hairs are the quickest, easiest, and sometimes the only way to tell whether a cannabis plant is male or female.
Signs of a Hermaphrodite Plant
When a plant is stressed, it may begin to produce flowers of the opposite sex on a portion of its own. This isn’t a big deal; more female blooms will, at worst, result in the plant fertilizing itself. In an all-female garden, however, one hermaphrodite plant can result in many plants producing seeds where they aren’t needed.
When looking for hermaphrodite plants, there are two signs to search for. The first and less evident question is whether the plants produce both sorts of flowers. It’s tempting to inspect one or two nodes on a plant and assume that whatever you find there is the plant’s guaranteed gender.
Unfortunately, if you have any stressors in your garden, you need to inspect numerous nodes on multiple plant locations before proclaiming it one gender or the other.
The presence of anthers is another, a more evident indicator of a hermaphrodite plant. Because of their curved form and often yellow color, anthers are frequently referred to as bananas.
Unfortunately, these anthers do not need to burst to pollinate female flowers, so if you don’t want to grow seeds in your garden, remove them as soon as you detect them.
It’s quite useful to know how to detect if your plant is male or female before blossoming, so do your best to understand these techniques.
Paying attention to the sex of your plants will assist your crop to be of greater quality, no matter what else is going on. It will also help you grow your new strains or simply make your existing favorite strain a little tougher.
Faq about male and female marijuana plants
How can you know whether a plant is male or female?
Examine the cannabis plant’s nodes for the early development of little sacs on a male plant or two bracts on a female plant, which will generate the hair-like stigma.
What is the best way to detect if your female plant has been pollinated?
Your female’s bracts will grow larger as she grows, indicating that she has been pollinated.
Why do marijuana cultivators prefer female plants?
Male cannabis plants generate less THC content yield, which is less expensive; hence all marijuana farmers prefer female plants to produce buds with more THC content and profit.
