Sexing a marijuana plant is just checking out whether they are male or female. This is often essential information for two reasons. The primary is that female plants are the individual marijuana plants that will produce the buds growers are looking for; males are reserved solely for fertilization and creating seeds. The second reason it’s important to understand the sex of each marijuana plant because if males are left with females when their pollen sacs are able to burst open, they’re going to pollinate the females, and therefore the growers are going to be left with only seed.
We are going to quote sex in your plant to work out whether it is a male or a female; its widespread beginner growers question. Now, if you’ve researched growing for a minimum of an hour, you recognize that to grow potent marijuana, you would like to grow non-pollinated females. Having a male plant growing in your grow room can be a disaster because one male can pollinate all the females within the room, and as a result, they will not produce anything with harvesting.
Seed companies have mostly fixed this potential problem by selling feminized seeds. However, once in a while, a female can still change into a hermaphrodite, a plant with both male and female sexual characteristics. So how do you tell what gender you’ve got and when are you able to tell. In terms of timing, some people wait until they are going into flowering to determine gender, but growers with experience can tell much earlier.
FEMALE CANNABIS PLANTS
In the pre-flowering stage, female plants will start to grow small, white, wispy hairs known as pistils at the nodes. This is also eventually where the first small buds will form. Keep in mind that females often express gender a bit later than males; also, pistils are never green, so keep an eye out.
Moving forward into the peak flowering stage, unpollinated female plants will produce sizeable seedless buds that become coated in thick, sticky resin. This is where cannabinoids, terpenes, and other essential compounds are most highly concentrated. From an evolutionary standpoint, the resin is actually produced to attract and attach more pollen to the plant.
When you have identified which of your plants are female and which are male, separate them. Keeping the female plants together basically sexually frustrates them into producing more resin to attract the pollen they’re isolated from. This is the process that delivers the most potent, resinous buds. Keep your female plants with males, and they’ll simply be pollinated and produce seeds.
MALE CANNABIS PLANTS
If high-quality bud is your goal, then you will want to be careful with isolating your female plants. If the stalk of your plant is skinny, it’s female. The male plant has a thicker, sturdier stalk with fewer leaves from its branches.
It is at the base of these branches you will see an important indicator. Male plants will have ball-shaped pollen sacs. The vast majority of home cultivators try to separate males from females as soon as physically possible. Once you can distinguish between the two, you’ll want to carefully isolate the males, making sure not to pollinate your females by agitating the pollen sacs accidentally. Even after the males are removed, there are still other factors to consider, such as hermaphrodite plants.
