Knowing how to determine between male and female plants helps you succeed at cultivating and getting the best outcomes from your harvest. So it is not just enough that you pick the right artificial lighting to help your plants grow healthy and produce the best yields when cultivating cannabis indoors. Here are some of the things you need to know about weed gender and how it impacts cultivation.
What You Need to Know
If you are planting regular cannabis seeds, it is likely that only 50% will develop to grow buds. This is because only half of the seeds may be female cannabis plants which are the only ones capable of producing the crop you need.
2. To grow all-female plants, you may have to buy feminized cannabis seeds which are bred specifically to grow as female cannabis plants that produce smokable buds.
3. Male plants produce pollens that are good for breeding. But you do not want them growing alongside your female cannabis longer than they have to. The last thing you need is for the males to pollinate the female plants which will lead to the production of seeds instead of the THC that you need from the buds.
4. Sexing or determining plant gender as early as you can give you plenty of time to transfer or remove the male plants from the grow room to prevent pollination.
5. You can get hints of the plant’s gender during the pre-flowering stage which begins at around six weeks.
6. During the flowering stage, the pollen sacs of the male cannabis plants open and pollen can easily spread in your grow room. You need to make sure that your female plants are well-protected from this.
7. Factors like stress may cause hermaphroditism in cannabis plants which result to the development of both male and female characteristics. Some plants may initially start to grow the pear-shaped growth with white hairs of female plants but will grow pollen sacs later on.
What To Look For
1. Take a look at the parts where the main stem and leaf stems are joined. Check for any pear-shaped growth that may be starting to develop pistils or what look like white hairs. If you see this, that means the plant is female.