Identifying Males and Females from Marijuana Seeds
When Growing marijuana seeds there is a chance it could be female or male, you can increase your odds for females if the growing conditions are optimal. After planting marijuana seeds and letting the plants vegetate for a while, the next step is to determine the sex of the plants also known as sexing. Determining the sex of a plant can be tricky if you don’t know what to look for. It is best to determine the sex as early as possible. Determining a plants sex protects against unwanted pollination resulting in marijuana seeds. Males have no use in the garden, unless you are planning on breeding plants. They also could be disastrous to the crop if their flowers open and pollinate the female flowers. Pollination creates marijuana seeds which lowers the potency and overall usable weight. Pollinated female flowers will spend all their energy making seeds instead of buds.
Determining Sex After Planting Regular Marijuana Seeds
There are several methods you can use to determine sex. Early growth in a plant such as height and vigorous growth can indicate a sign of a male but this is not an optimal way of sexing a plant. Discussed below are the two best ways to determine sex in young plants that you grow from regular marijuana seeds.
The first way to determine sex is early visible detection. In some strains but not all of them, there is a single small female or male flower that shows in vegetation. The flower can be located by looking at the nodes of the plant where the leaf petioles and the stem meet. The plant is the same sex as the little flower showing. Normally my plants in vegetation start showing sex after they are about 30 centimeters tall.
The small female flower is called a calyx.
The small male flower looks like a ball it is a pollen sac.
When the above method does not show a small flower there is a different way to determine sex and that is to induce early flowering. Light cycle manipulation, is forcing a plant to flower and show its sex. This can take up to ten days to do. It also takes ten days to switch back to vegetative growth. Instead of forcing the whole plant to flower a simpler way is to take cutting of the plants you want to determine sex.
Label the clone and the mother plant so you know what cutting came from the matching mother plant. Place cutting in a cup of water or in a planting mix under a flowering light schedule of 12 hours on and 12 hours off for at least 10 days. Giving the cutting more darkness speeds signs of flowering by a few days such as 8 hours of light and 16 hours of darkness. Within 10 days the cutting will show flower signs and indication of sex is visible. Once you have determined the gender of the cuttings, you should get rid of any males. So remember if you grow marijuana seeds you have to determine sex of the plants so males don’t pollinate your females. Choosing marijuana seeds can be difficult, but if you would like to avoid checking for sex make sure you get feminized cannabis seeds.
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