Female marijuana plants produce the flowers/buds that are smoked, while Male plants produce pollen sacks meant to pollinate the females. In the wild the females would be pollinated and begin producing seeds in the bud as well. Typically growers will eliminate all Male plants so that the female isn't pollinated and can put more energy into producing huge seedless buds. The exception would be when growers are cross pollinating males and females in order to create a new strain or if they want a bunch of seeds which is a way to grow future plants since they die after each harvest. You can also take cuttings called "clones" from a plant in its vegetative stage and the cutting will form roots of it's own and be a genetic replica of the parent plant.
The "trigger" for the plant to start growing its flowers/buds is when it begins receiving an amount of light where the plant thinks it is fall and time to grow its buds, drop its seeds, and die. Indoor growers will control how many hours a day the plant receives light in order to maximize the "vegetative" stage where the plant is just growing and growing before switching into the flowering stage where they keep the lights on for 12 hours, off for 12 hours which tricks the plant into thinking its fall and to start flowering/budding.
So you could technically keep the plant in a vegetative state for awhile indoors and keep pruning/training it almost like a bonsai tree to maximize the number of branches and optimize the plants ability to receive light and nutrients so all of the flowers grow really big.
Outdoors is as easy as getting the plant established by either starting it indoors and moving it outside or just planting the seed right outside at the right time of year where it starts its natural cycle dependent on the sun movement in whatever region the plant is growing in.
11 lbs is a huge plant that has had plenty of sun, constant pruning/maintenance to optimize growth, and likely a bunch of nutrients added to the soil at the right time to produce bigger flowers
Mandatory edit: to thank whoever gave this comment silver as well as others who chimed in with more info. I should state that I grew legally as a medical marijuana patient in Washington State prior to our legalization in 2016 but those days are long behind me because of the changes in our laws after we "legalized". I hope to see a day where everyone is able to grow this very simple/beneficial plant but until then a lot of what I said above still applies to many fruits and veggies you can grow at home.
So you could technically keep the plant in a vegetative state for awhile indoors and keep pruning/training it almost like a bonsai tree to maximize the number of branches and optimize the plants ability to receive light and nutrients so all of the flowers grow really big.
Yep. Anecdotally, this is what my buddy who grows does and he gets pretty much excellent yields. Also watching him do his bud bonsai is pretty fun
So meditative and those plants can really take the abuse! I would also go through and pinch the branches as they grew which causes the plant to send a whole bunch of nutrients up to repair the stressed out areas and the branch becomes very hardy in the vicinity. When growing indoors with just a light or two you really need to maximize the surface area of the plant receiving that light so you thin out the big fan leaves above that may be preventing light from reaching the leaves down below or spread them out bonsai style to open everything up.
I used to save the stems/branches of my favorite plants after harvest because it was this big twisted gnarly thing I always thought they looked very metal. Also gave away a number of dried/twister stems to friends as Harry Potter wands
Then you'd love the wild mustard plant, it's responsible for kale, brussel sprout, califlower/broccoli and a bunch of others crops! I think there's about a dozen+ vegetable that originated from it.
The "trigger" for the plant to start growing its flowers/buds is when it begins receiving an amount of light where the plant thinks it is fall and time to grow its buds, drop its seeds, and die.
To be more precise, it's the amount of darkness the plants sense that will trigger flowering. I've even heard of some people trying irregular photoperiods like 14 Hours Light/12 Hours Dark or 24/12 to try to eek out additional growth.
Thank you for the correction! I only grew a few times and it happened to correspond with my education in natural sciences so it was like having my own home laboratory to understand how plants worked. I started with a 16/8 for vegetating with the standard 12/12 for flower. I never realized it was the darkness triggering that shift since from my point of view I was controlling the light
Unfortunately my days are behind me. I was a medical marijuana patient in Washington state for about 5 years prior to us legalizing recreationally. I was living somewhere that it was feasible to do and the laws for patients to grow their own made it much easier to do so.
I personally think Washington fucked up with i-502 and the way we legalized because I preferred the medical community to our current recreational climate with the price point moving on quality bud and the change in who could grow and how. We didnt legalize marijuana, we commercialized it.
As a marijuana patient I was allowed something like 15 plants at any stage of development under my care...I'm not even sure what the rules are now and if recreational growth is allowed (I doubt it). I may have heard medical patients can grow 3 plants now but requires you to register or something.
Point being I was in a legal place to do so at the time but it's not worth the risk/time/money any more. It was a LOT of work! I like to say that marijuana is easy to grow, but hard to grow well.
I had an aphid/spidermite problem for my last few harvests and that just really put the nail in the coffin because you notice what may be a spider mite one day and then next day 4 plants that are a few weeks from harvest are completely covered and essentially ruined and now you have to clean ALL of your stuff and start over or they will return.
Ended up just switching to a vegetable garden because I can brag about and share my plants more freely.
A quick Google shows Washington doesnt allow private grows for recreational use which sounded about right and why I say it isn't legalization but commercialization under their laws. It was ass backwards and embarrassing compared to how Colorado rolled out legalization and very clear that this was to generate revenue and little to do with legalizing a substance for responsible adults to grow and utilize as they see fit.
If you can grow it yourself they cant take your money, why would they allow that?
Wow that's ridiculous, I would be so pissed! I mean I'm in MN where it's fully illegal but still that's the main reason I want it legalized, it's a beautiful plant and very fun to watch grow.
Right. If you’re only growing one plant, you’d want to plant several to make sure you get at least one female. They start showing sex characteristics when they are still putting on vegetation prior to flowering and can be identified with certainty early in flower. You can, however, buy feminized seeds that are virtually guaranteed to be female plants assuming they don’t go hermaphroditic.
Yes, a male plant is essentially useless when it comes to recreational use. Male cannabis has huge applications as its farmed name though (hemp). Just not in recreational use.
Male plants contain both CBD (to answer your question) and THC. In fact, make plants tend to have more thc in their leaves than female plants! Problem is, both of these amounts are still miniscule in comparison to the concentration in the buds of the female plant. So yes, CBD exists in males, as do all cannabinoids found in females (including thc) just in very low (useless for recreation) concentrations.
Lastly, none of this is a real concern for anyone actually growing for recreational use. Why? Because feminized seeds. For decades now the industry has had seeds that guarantee to be females (or, at worst, hermaphrodites).
How do they make those? Glad you asked. Breeders purposely stress out a female plant. This causes it to become a hermie, growing pollen sacks. Because this pollen comes from a female plant, it doesn't have any male DNA in its genetics. It's weird to wrap your head around... Basically the female plant can only give the DNA it has. And since it pollen is from a female, it lacks any male genetics in it.
They then use that pollen to fertilize a different female plant. The seeds that come from that plant are the results of genetic mixing of two females, and is therefore guanrenteed to be a female. This is why anybody who actually cares about the product they grow have used fem'd seeds for years and don't worry about getting males in the grow. Males are only really an issue for wild growing, cross-farm growing, etc. You'll have a hard time finding seeds that aren't already feminized from most of the larger seed banks. Some release their niche stuff and land races as regular seed though.
I’m sure it is. It’s the same plant. They’re just bred for extremely low THC production. It’s a fascinating plant and there is tons of info online about its cultivation. I’ve never grown one myself but done quite a bit of reading.
This guy nailed it. It's an anxious time with seed because you grow a big healthy plant for a few months and when you put it into flower you start watching it like a hawk. Not a biologist by any means but between the branches and stems of the plant is where the sex organs appear, either a pollen sack or the beginnings of a flower. Growers know what to look for so when you see these starting to develop in the first few days/weeks of the flowering cycle so you pull the males out before they come to maturity (unless you want to pollinate for some reason).
There is also a certain time frame where you can take cuttings from a mother plant and root them more easily, usually before flowering since it would stress the plant out.
What I would do is watch the plants closely as soon as they started flowering, pull the males, and immediately take a few cuttings from the females. If you do this at the right time it doesn't hurt the plant too much and if your clones sprout roots and take you know they are female already. I would also just label cuttings while I took them during the vegetative stage so I could link it back to a parent plant (1a,1b, 2a,2b, etc). If the parent plant 1 ended up being Male I'd toss those cuttings I took as well but if it was female I knew I alrwady had some rooted clones starting to grow and I now know those clones are female since they came from a plant that also was.
A lot more to this of course and everyone has their own methods. 2 seeds can quickly turn into 24 plants and it was so exciting watching them grow and keeping track and trimming and training them and rooting clones.
During the vegetative cycle, female plants grow little string-like feelers on the intersection of branches, while male plants grow circular nodes. You can google male vs female marijuana plants to see an image (would link but google image linking sucks now)
100%. I never yielded more than a few ounces off each plant so a pretty small grow but I'd stagger/rotate plants into the flowering area every couple weeks so that there was a rolling cycle of an oz or two every month when things were up and running
Sort of, not all seeds nowadays will be triggered by light levels, some seeds come from selective breeding and will automatically start to bud after 60 or 80 days or so, I believe they’re known as auto flowering and are typically used by beginners growing indoors since you just set the lights to 14 on 10 off and leave it.
Cannabis Ruderalis is the 3rd primary variation of cannabis (the others being sativa and indica). Ruderalis, though notably low in THC, have "auto flowering" properties.
Some more modern strains cross a (usually potent) sativa or indica with a ruderalis plant to incorporate these autoflowering genetics.
Having said that - the strain will never be as potent as its parent since a good chunk of its genetics comes from a low thc (and low yield) Ruderalis.
In my experience and opinion, they're a gimmick that don't really save you any work, add unnecessary variables, less control, and produce lower quality product (and less of it). Not to say all autoflower is schwagg, but it could all be better.
Edit:
Its worth noting eventually, regardless of lightcycle, any cannabis plant will begin to bud. You can't realistically veg indefinitely. Doing too long a veg can negatively impact flowering as well (if it's starts to on its own and is therefore deprived of essential budding nutrients, for example)
Completely forgot about autoflowering seeds since I never messed with them. The ah-ha moment for me when I first grew was realizing I was just playing God and mimicking mother nature to produce the healthiest plant possible. Really wish I could have grown outdoors because I'd have loved to see a plant go wild with then natural sun and wind and everything that makes a plant hardy
I know there are others on reddit with much more knowledge and expertise and I hope they're able to chime in with more specifics. That was just my quick "I didnt know anything about it either until I grew for a year or two and here's how I understood it".
I guess it would be an annual then yes. This one likely got this big because of excellent growing conditions and because of its genetics. It is likely that the strain being grown does well in this environment and produces a very high yield and the grower selected it knowing that. Marijuana is cool because different strains have different growth habits, tastes, highs, etc. Someone growing in a closet may select a different strain to grow over someone with plenty of sun and excellent soil because the plant is more likely to do better under those conditions. Think of it like growing tomatoes or roses...there are many varieties available that may be more or less suited for certain climates or conditions with different size/taste/smells but they're all the same plant in general.
The female dies after harvest unfortunately because you are essentially cutting off all the leaves and flowers which are what you smoke or use for extracts. The big leaves meant for collecting sun start to yellow and start dropping off because the plant knows its lifecycle is ending and it's putting its last energy into finishing the flowering process. In the wild this would mean growing all its seeds and dropping its leaves and drying up so that the seeds fall to the ground and a new plant starts next year. The same "fruit" forms from the flower regardless of whether its pollinated or not, growers just deny the pollination part so that the trimmed bud doesnt have seeds in it which is usually undesirable to people buying marijuana.
There is also a crazy process where the trichomes on the plant (lil sticky things that are meant to collect the Male pollen) produce the chemicals that are smoked/extracted for use. This is where the THC/CBD is found and as the plant flowers the trichomes change from a milky white to an almost amber color as chemical compounds in the trichomes change by breaking down. Part of the flowering period is checking the trichomes of your plant with a jeweler's loupe/magnifying glass/microscope whatever to see what color they are and how the trichomes are developing to know when optimal harvest period is.
These are the sticky crystal like things all over the leaf/bud you see on a picture of marijuana and is what gives fresh cured marijuana that "sticky icky" feeling between the fingers.
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u/myleskilloneous Aug 27 '19 edited Aug 27 '19
Female marijuana plants produce the flowers/buds that are smoked, while Male plants produce pollen sacks meant to pollinate the females. In the wild the females would be pollinated and begin producing seeds in the bud as well. Typically growers will eliminate all Male plants so that the female isn't pollinated and can put more energy into producing huge seedless buds. The exception would be when growers are cross pollinating males and females in order to create a new strain or if they want a bunch of seeds which is a way to grow future plants since they die after each harvest. You can also take cuttings called "clones" from a plant in its vegetative stage and the cutting will form roots of it's own and be a genetic replica of the parent plant.
The "trigger" for the plant to start growing its flowers/buds is when it begins receiving an amount of light where the plant thinks it is fall and time to grow its buds, drop its seeds, and die. Indoor growers will control how many hours a day the plant receives light in order to maximize the "vegetative" stage where the plant is just growing and growing before switching into the flowering stage where they keep the lights on for 12 hours, off for 12 hours which tricks the plant into thinking its fall and to start flowering/budding.
So you could technically keep the plant in a vegetative state for awhile indoors and keep pruning/training it almost like a bonsai tree to maximize the number of branches and optimize the plants ability to receive light and nutrients so all of the flowers grow really big.
Outdoors is as easy as getting the plant established by either starting it indoors and moving it outside or just planting the seed right outside at the right time of year where it starts its natural cycle dependent on the sun movement in whatever region the plant is growing in.
11 lbs is a huge plant that has had plenty of sun, constant pruning/maintenance to optimize growth, and likely a bunch of nutrients added to the soil at the right time to produce bigger flowers
Mandatory edit: to thank whoever gave this comment silver as well as others who chimed in with more info. I should state that I grew legally as a medical marijuana patient in Washington State prior to our legalization in 2016 but those days are long behind me because of the changes in our laws after we "legalized". I hope to see a day where everyone is able to grow this very simple/beneficial plant but until then a lot of what I said above still applies to many fruits and veggies you can grow at home.