In the world of plants, reproduction can happen in a variety of ways. Monoecious plants produce two different types of flowers on the same plant, and hermaphrodite plants grow single flowers that have both male and female reproductive organs.
Cannabis is a dioecious plant, meaning male or female reproductive organs appear on different plants.
With cannabis, females are usually isolated away from males—introducing males into a marijuana grow tent will result in pollination, causing females to create seeds.
This is important for a breeder to achieve new genetics, but most growers remove the males to allow females to produce seedless buds, also called sinsemilla. These are the resinous buds that appear on the store shelf; they all come from female plants.
In males, small round pollen sacs will form. These seed-like balls form in the internode and are where the plants pollen comes from. Since cannabis is pollinated through open air pollination, these sacs will eventually rupture. When they do, they send pollen sailing through the air, hopefully to land on a female plants pistils and start seed production. Male plants typically produce little to no flowers and have a lower content of THC on average.
Within the female plants internodes, small bracts or pear shape nodes begin to form. These eventually will produce two hairlike strands called pistils.
Pistils are what catch the male plants pollen and where seed production will begin to form. Female plants produce flower and have higher CBD and THC content on average than males. Female plants are prefered over males in terms of bud and cannabinoid collection.
A female cannabis plant means you will have better nugs! If you intend to cultivate marijuana, the most likely goal is to produce usable, smokable, or sellable product in the end. Therefore, you only want the female plant.
This is why the production of feminized seeds has become such a big thing. Instead of leaving it to luck, you know the seeds you plant will produce female marijuana plants.
Regular seeds give you a 50% chance of either gender. If you plant ten seeds, for example, the laws of probability state that you may have five male plants. In this instance, you waste potentially half of your time and resources on male plants. This guide is for individuals who don’t want to pay extra for feminized seeds. Also, differentiating between male and female plants is a useful skill.
Feminized seeds don’t offer a 100% success guarantee, either. If you are growing cannabis outdoors, there is a chance that male pollen could float over and all but ruin your female crops.
A QUICK NOTE ABOUT HERMAPHRODITES
As we mentioned, hermaphrodites contain the sex organs of both male and female hemp plants. That means they also have the ability to pollinate female plants and should be culled from your fields along with your males.
Some hermaphrodites are the result of poor seed genetics, but hemp plants can also become hermaphrodites as a result of trauma or stress. Some of the most common triggers that cause plants to “herm out” are:
Disease
Bad weather
Nutrient deficiencies
High temperatures
Inconsistent lighting (when growing indoors)
Plant damage
If your plants have undergone stress, like a major weather event, or you notice plants with damage, such as broken branches, take the time to check to see if they are hermaphrodites and need to be culled.
HOW TO AVOID HERMAPHRODITE PLANTS IN YOUR GROW ROOM
Hermaphroditism stems from two major driving factors: stress and genetics. In regards to stress, hermaphroditism serves as a survival mechanism. If a plant experiences damage, heat, disease, or nutrient deficiencies, they start to freak out. Essentially, plants get the impression that their time is up. In a last-ditch attempt to reproduce, they decide to stop waiting around for a male and get the job done themselves.
To avoid this issue, try to maintain a stable environment in your grow room. Use a thermo-hygrometer to monitor temperature and humidity, keep your light schedule strict, and ensure your plants get all the nutrients they require.
Even if you have all of these bases covered, plants can still pollinate themselves due to poor genetics. Plants with a bad genetic history and too much genetic variation are prone to becoming hermaphrodites. For this reason, it’s important to shop with reputable companies that offer high-quality seeds with stable genetics.
As we said, this article is for those who grow cannabis plants from seeds they pulled from their nugs. You will also find this guide useful if you have random seeds that you know are not feminized.
The old saying goes that “there is no stigma on a female clone for plants that look like marijuana,” and this rings true even to this day.
When growing indoors, you can’t go wrong with clones if you want to avoid the male weed plant altogether. They’re a little more fragile than seedlings (mainly because they don’t produce a strong taproot). However, for efficiency and “ease-of-use,” they’re typically your best bet. As long as they’re appropriately rooted, clones are pretty hard to screw up.
Also, they make sexing cannabis – and knowing how to tell if your plant is male or female before flowering – totally irrelevant. On the downside, clones are expensive. While there’s typically a big difference in cost for recreational or medical patients (MMJ cardholders usually get a 50% price reduction or thereabouts), you can expect to pay around $20-$30 for a single plant.
When to Sex Cannabis Plants?
Our goal here today is to learn how to tell the difference between male and female cannabis plants early on, so you can get the males away from the females as soon as possible! It will help protect your lady plants – but also spare you the wasted time, resources, and energy of tending to male plants that you don’t intend to keep.
Keeping in mind that every strain and grow set-up (e.g. indoors, outdoors, daylight hours) creates varying circumstances, most cannabis plants begin to pre-flower as early as 4 weeks after germination. By week 6, the pre-flowers begin to reveal their gender and you should be able to identify the sex using the tips to follow. Once the plants go into full flower (8 to 10 weeks on average, for a natural outdoor grow) the differences between male and female plants will be glaringly obvious. We’ll talk more about exactly what each sex looks like in a moment.
Until we can tell the sex for sure, we continue to treat the plants equally. We start our seeds in small 4-inch nursery pots. About two weeks after germination, we pot the seedlings up into an approximately two-gallon (trade size) “sexing pot” like these BPA-free nursery pots. This enables everyone to continue to grow in a happy and healthy manner for several more weeks*. Then, once we can surely tell the difference between the male and female cannabis plants, only the ladies move into their forever home – 15 to 25 gallon grow bags full of recycled organic living soil.
HOW TO PREPARE YOUR GROW SPACE?
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. If you are a beginner, a marijuana grow tent kit can help you more.
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. If you want to try, ECO Farm 2ft*2ft Grow Tent Kit is recommended for you.
Female Plants vs. Male Cannabis Plants: Final Thoughts
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. One of these lessons involves spotting a pesky male marijuana plant from a mile away!
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.
Please remember, the consumption of marijuana is the sole responsibility of the user. By the way, eco farm grow tent can be your great choice.