Can you tell the difference between a male, female and hermaphroditic cannabis plant?
Male cannabis plants are about as useful to a cannabis plant grower as a bull is to a dairy farmer.
Okay, you may need it to help with fertilisation and cross breeding, but it won’t provide you with
juicy terpenes-rich and sticky buds.
Not that a bull has sticky buds either, but you get the analogy.
So, to avoid the embarrassing and time-wasting situation of spending months caring for your
cannabis plants only to discover they are all males, how can you tell male and female cannabis plants apart.
More to the point most of us have only ever heard of a worm being a hermaphrodite, and not a
cannabis plant, so what’s that all about?
To tell them apart, you have to wait until the pre-flowering phase as seedlings and plants in a
vegetative state are impossible to sex.
Only female plants develop flowers, or buds as they are known, which produce THC- and CBD-rich
cannabis.
Male plants, on the other hand, develop small pollen sacs at the same place as buds, which is that
space in the V created between the stem and leaf of the cannabis plant.
In the pre-flowering stage, male plants will develop small egg-like structures around the plant’s node, though you may need a magnifying glass to spot them early on.
The sooner you identify a plant as male, the sooner you can remove it from the growing space so
that you only need to concentrate on female plants.
Additionally, the last thing you want mixed up among your female plants is a randy male plant!
In case you are worried about accidentally removing female plants, you can wait a further couple of weeks as then the female flowers should begin to appear.
They appear in the same place as the male pollen sacs, around the node, but it is easy to tell if a plant is female as the round flower bud will be covered in hairs. The mail pollen sac is hairless.
Of course, pollen sacs are still an essential part of the cannabis pant grower’s arsenal, but only for
the purposes of breeding and cross breeding strains.
Finally, we have the hermaphrodite plant, which comes in two forms, The true hermaphrodite, and
the ‘banana’ plant which, sadly, does not produce THC-rich bananas. Now there’s an idea…
The hermaphrodite is easy to spot as it has male pollen sacs on some nodes, and female flower buds on others, though never both on the same node.
The ‘banana’ plant is so named as protruding from the female bud is a banana-shaped appendage,
which is actually a pollen sac and which fertilises the buds immediately surrounding it.
if you are a novice grower and you want to ensure that you have only female cannabis plants, then
invest in feminised seeds, then you have nothing to worry about, as these seeds only ever produce
female plants.
Let us know how you make the distinction in the comment section below.
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