Male vs Female Cannabis Plant

The Cannabis plant is a diploid organism, meaning the chromosomes comes in pair. Males plants a represented as XY chromosomes pair and the females show an XX pairing. The growers are all after the female plant as those are plants that give us the flowers containing the sought-after THC, CBD and other cannabinoids and terpenes. Here is a quick guide on how to identify the sex of your plants.

Marijuana Gender and Life Stages

In a natural environment, cannabis seeds will usually be half and half between male and female seeds. Only the female seeds are usable for growing buds. Male plants are mostly used to produce hemp products as the XY chromosomes plant will grow bigger branches but lacks the THC-filled flowers we are all looking for.

Male plant showing small balls of pollen at the base

Male Cannabis Plant

Under natural settings, the males will start flowering sooner than females. Generally, after a week up to the fourth week depending on the strains and environmental factors, the plants will start showing flowers. Males can be identified by those small balls or sacs of pollen forming at the base of branches known as pollen sacs. A looser and more spread-out pattern of spaces in between each leaf can generally be an indicator of a male plant as well. Males will be taller and larger than females with a heavy concentration of flowers at the top-half part of the plant.

Female plant showing calyxes with pistils pointing upwards

Female Cannabis Plant

The difference with a female flower is the calyx is usually more oval, pod-shaped with a stigma sticking out called pistils or long white hairs coming out of the pod. In the pre-flower phase, the pistil might not be sticking out yet but the gender can be identified by the shape of the calyx.

The life cycle of a cannabis plant

At the end of the vegetative cycle when the plant is been exposed to 18-24 hours since the beginning of its life cycle and the plant grew to about half of the size you’d like it to reach, a grower should be switching over to the flowering phase until harvest. The flowering phase consists of a different set of nutrients and vitamins and a shorter light cycle, usually around 12 hours on 12 hours off. After the first couple of weeks of this second cycle is when you should be seeing the definitive signs of a plant’s gender. Then it becomes a matter of the type of strains used and the desired results will dictate how long you keep your plants in the flowering stage until harvest time.

As previously mentioned, when you get seeds, they will usually come half females and half males. You can now buy feminized seeds allowing you to not waste too much time waiting on your babies to show their first signs of gender and grow females only. You can also clone a plant, label all of your plants carefully to know which one is which. As soon as the clones have grown a basic root system, switch them to the flowering phase by giving them 12 hours of total darkness and they should start showing signs of their genders within two weeks. Discard the males immediately after noticing the pollen balls and you bring your females back to a vegetative mode to grow them to the desired size before bringing them back into a flowering mode.

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