Featured Strain:
Cannabis seeds commonly come in any three different
varieties: Regular, Feminized, and
Autoflowering.
Regular seeds are preferred by breeders and those who love a traditional approach. Regular seeds are the all natural product of a cannabis plant, and a pack of seeds will generaly produce about 50% female plants and 50% male plants. There are a lot of old school genetics that are only available in regular seed, and they are a great resource for a pheno-hunt!
This article will walk you through a few of the many methods you can use to identify the sex of a your cannabis plant.
For the casual gardener:
Pros: super obvious, super easy, happens without any extra work
Cons: you will have to destroy several month old, beautiful, beloved plants. You will have invested soil, nutrients, space and time to males until they are old enough to identify
When a cannabis plant begins to physically show its sex, it begins creating flowers. Both male
and female plants create flowers, but they look completely different, and only the female flower is a smokable, tokable, cannabinoid containing nugget. Male flowers produce an incredible amount of pollen that blows onto its female counterparts and causes that female plant to produce seeds. For this reason, male plants are best ejected from the garden as soon as they are identified.
These males can be easily identified once the plants begin their flowering cycle. This occurs indoor when you flip your lights (most commonly) from 18/6 to 12/12 on/off cycle. Outdoor in the midwest, the transition is a little more gradual but happens about mid/late July.
The simplest way to identify male plants is to simply wait until they start growing flowers, take a stroll about your weed garden daily, and inspect the plants for signs of their sex. The male flowers tend to develop more rapidly and are quickly identifiable. They grow in clusters of oblong pods, also known as pollen sacs. They look nothing like the female nugs we are all used to, and they develop much more rabidly.
A good rule of thumb is to identify and remove a male plant within three days of its first identifiable flower to avoid pollen spread.
For the Purposeful Grower
Pros: Identify the sex of each plant in a much shorter time, wastes significantly fewer resources, super obvious identifiers
Cons: Some extra work involved, some basic cannabis knowledge needed
Whether you are growing for a patient or for casual use, you intend to have the most bountiful crop you can manage. You are more intentional than the casual gardener, you've invested some time and money into the project, and you want maximum yields!!
To minimize the amount of time and resources you have to waste on a male plant before you determine its sex, we take a different approach. You can cut out significant time by taking a clone of each plant early on, and flipping the young rooted clone into the flowering cycle.
Clones can be taken as early as fifth node (4-6 week old plant). Take a cutting from each plant you are trying to determine the sex of, and place them in whatever cloning solution/station that you would usually use.
Many people use a cloning gel like Clonex, and place their gelled cuttings in a cloning
station that mists the developing roots with a water/nutrient solution.
You would then set the light cycle to 12/12. This causes the young plants to go into a "forced flowering" cycle. The cuttings will begin showing their sex withing 1-3 weeks of being placed in the cloner. They develop obvious flowers that are just as easy to identify as the Casual Gardener process, but this whole process takes just a few weeks compared to the months it would take to let a plant develop naturally.
For the Old School Is Still Cool folks
Both males and females produce pre-flowers and flowers in the junctions between stems or branches. The very first pre-flowers show up in the crook between the main plant stalk and a fan leaf stem (petiole), usually near the top of the plant. Males often start showing their sex first.
To sex your plants the Old School way, finds yourself a jewelers loupe, or some other magnifying tool, and take a look at the junctions between the stem and branches. Plants will begin to show their pre-flowers at 4-5 weeks old. The Rev says he sexes all of his plants between 25 and 35 days after germination.
A male pre-flower is a more round version than the female pre-flower part. It is often referred to as a “spade” ♣ - it has a fuller round base and a slight tip. As it becomes slightly larger, the male pre-flower resembles a ball at the end of a stick. This pre-flower will eventually develop into a long hanging sack of baby bananas – the pollen sacs.
Female pre-flowers are more pear-like, with a longer slender pointed tip. That is called her calyx. Extending from the tip of the calyx may be a pair of pistils, or white hair-like protrusions. Not every female cannabis plant in pre-flower produces pistils.
If sexing plants still isn't your cup of tea, then feminized or autoflowering seeds may be right for you.
Feminized seeds are created when a mother plant is treated with a silver colloidal spray. The resulting seeds from the plant will all produce female plants of their own. This process eliminates the need to sex your plants.
Autoflowering seeds are created when a cannabis plant is crossed with a ruderalis plant. The resulting plants have a much shorter lifespan than a traditional photoperiod cannabis plant. They are also not sensitive to the light cycle change and will start producing flower at about 3 weeks old. These plants are preferred by those cannabis cultivators who want a small, simple grow that requires regular watering, some nutrients, and little else in about 90 days!
Great job on the blog! I think I could sex a plant now. Happy Pride Month Becca