How to know if a marijuana plant is male or female
Cannabis sativa sp, that is, the marijuana plant, is a dioecious or unisexual specimen. This means that it is a plant that produces both male and female flowers on different plants. However, there are also marijuana plants that are hermaphrodites, so they will be able to produce male flowers and female flowers on the same plant. Sexing marijuana plants allows you to separate the male from the female. The division has nothing to do with not getting along, but to maximize your harvest. Pay attention to us: boys with boys and girls with girls. Today we are going to talk to you about how to sex your marijuana plants and how to know which ones are male and which are female as soon as the flowering cycle has started.
12x12
The flowering of cannabis plants begins as soon as it receives 12 hours of uninterrupted light and 12 of darkness in each of the 24-hour cycles. These cycles are known as photoperiod and allow the plant to enter a pre-flowering stage in which they increase in size to facilitate the branch to support the flowers preparing their structure.
Pre-flowering, what will it be? What nerves!
The pre-flowering period usually lasts for about 10 days. Taking into account that the flowers should appear after two weeks, in the pre-flowering period it is not possible to know if a cannabis plant is male or female. In the case of feminized cannabis seeds or automatic cannabis seeds, this question no longer has a place, since they are plants grown to flourish as females.
How to sex marijuana plants?
Surely you have heard of the 12x12 light and dark methods or the 6pm light and 6h dark methods. This method is done with the mother plants and the process will depend on whether you are growing plants indoors or outdoors. The trick, in both cases, is to induce flowering to sex the marijuana plants. Indoors you can decide when to alter the photoperiod and artificially induce flowering. The process is very simple. Simply set the light timers to force the plant to produce the flowers ahead of time. Outside, things are not so simple. In these cases, it is necessary to wait until the hours of natural light have been considerably reduced. In fact, up to about 12 hours a day. Obviously, there is no exact rule for the precise moment when this will happen, since it is directly dependent on the area in which you live. If it serves as a reference, in northern Europe, the decrease to 12 hours of light a day occurs between mid and late July. When this happens, it is possible to induce the flowering of cannabis plants outdoors by exposing them to light during those 12 hours and covering or protecting them in an indoor area after that period of time. One of the difficulties with this method is that it requires consistency. Exposure to 12 hours of daily natural light should be done every day without fail. In the event that the periods of darkness are interrupted by an episode of light, a negative effect can be generated in the marijuana plant and immediately return it to an uninteresting vegetative state. In any case, we tell you this to improve your general culture, not for you to try to do it. Obviously, we cannot forbid you anything, but we can warn you that this type of method causes important hormonal changes inside the plant and induces stress, which could lead to hermaphroditic plants that would destroy your sexing plan for marijuana plants. If you are a little patient, your cannabis plant will reach its state of sexual maturity between six and eight weeks after germination without you making any changes in its photoperiod and there you will be able to recognize its sex. Removing some cases of hermaphroditism caused by stress, the marijuana plant will determine its sex for life once it reaches the cycle of the fifth or sixth stage of leaves and that is when you can sex your plants without any doubt. Our advice? Be patient and pay attention to the maturation of the plant to know the sex without resorting to modifying the photoperiods that can cause stress on the plant or cutting methods.
How to recognize the marijuana plant
Male marijuana plants have little bells grouped in panicles when they bloom. These bells hang down and open to release pollen, unlike female marijuana plants, which bloom through teardrop-shaped calyxes from which two white pistils emerge, clumping together and forming what we commonly know as buds. Or cogollazos if you are lucky and grow a luxury specimen.
