Sexing the PlantThe point of sexing a marijuana plant is to ensure that it is either male or female. Not many know that only female marijuana plants are the ones that produce marijuana that is capable of being smoked while male marijuana plants are mainly used for industrial products such as hemp, food, and clothing. Most times sexing a marijuana plant can be avoided if clones are bought immediately from a dispensary that guarantees all females. But on the other hand, if cloning your own marijuana plants are growing marijuana starting from seeds you will need to sex your plants yourself and remove any male plants that you may find.
Male plants are capable of pollinating your female plants which is not good for the outcome of your marijuana. This is because the marijuana that you crop will be infested with seeds from the male pollination. It is also very important to remove the male plants from your female plants because it may cause your female plants to become hermaphrodites. This too is not a good outcome for your marijuana plants if looking to crop out a decently sized yield. However, you do not have to throw away your male plants if some do occur. There are other uncommon uses for male marijuana plants that home growers can look into such as creating your own hemp fibers or simply just growing them for experience. Make sure though that they are completely separated from your female plants as they will most definitely impregnate your female plants through pollination. To properly identify the sexes of your plant if growing from seeds or if you are unsure of the gender of your clones is too simply keep them in the vegetation stage until they are an adequate size. An adequate plant size for proper sexing should be between 18 and 24 inches. The process is very easy and usually required a timer because you will be putting your plants through an early flowering stage. The flowering stage commonly exists of a 12 hour on and a 12 hour off light cycle. Allow your plants to enter this stage for NO MORE than two weeks, sometimes a grower can identify the sex of their plants before this two week mark is up but it never takes more than two weeks to identify and separate the males. If a grower does not enter into a pre flowering stage to identify the gender of the plants than the plants will begin to auto-flower after the vegetation stage and the window for removing males becomes much more limited and the chances of the male plants impregnating the female plants becomes much higher. After you have entered the plants into a 2 week flowering cycle it is OK to put the lights back onto the original vegetation stage cycle that you had before. This does not harm the plant but simply helps them start growing taller and bushier rather than tricking them into thinking that their life span is almost up and that harvesting will come soon. During this phase you can also continue feeding your plants the necessary nutrients for the vegetation stage instead of switching them to the nutrients needed for the flowering stage. The sexing of your plant won’t take more than two weeks so do not begin feeding them flowering nutrients. |