• Plant Sex – Females, Males, and Hermies

[pipeman]

Once your plants start flowering, within a couple of weeks they will start to show sex. Female plants will produce buds with white hairs while male plants will produce pollen sacks or balls. Most of us just want to grow MJ to smoke good bud, so therefore kill all male plants as soon as they are identified. A male plant can very quickly pollinate your female plants, greatly reducing the quantity and quality of your buds.

 

Another trait to look out for is hermies. A plant can appear to be female making nice bud then out of nowhere start to produce pollen sacks, thus making it part male and part female or IOW a hermie. Hermies should be killed along with the males, as they will pollinate your crop just as easily. If for some reason you only have hermie plants they will still produce good smoke, just try and pick all the pollen sacks off it as they appear to prevent or reduce pollination.

 

Hermies can be a genetic trait of the seed you are growing, or stress can turn females into hermies. Stress can be lack of water, temperature problems, interruption of light cycle, nute problems, basically anything that is too far outside of ideal conditions.

 

Related Topics:

Sexing your plant

Some pics of flowering females: Pic 1 Pic 2 Pic 3 Pic 4

Males

Hermaphrodite (Hermie)