Male Cannabis Plants

Male cannabis plants sex organs look like tiny little spheres growing on the nodes, the same location as your pistils. If left to mature, the pollen sacks will open and pollinate your females, the way flowering plants reproduce in the wild. More than likely however, you don't want your males to pollinate your females. Most growers interested in growing quality flower remove the males as soon as they're identified to keep their buds seedless and potent. which develop and fill with pollen. Like with the female plants, you'll notice the males' pollen sacks developing late in veg or early in flower. You still have a little time before the males are mature enough to spread their pollen, but you should remove the males as soon as they're identified.

How to determine female plants if starting out with regular seeds

You don’t have to wait for the flowering stage! There are two proper ways to use to determine a plant's sex in the vegetative stage. Of course, this step can be avoided with feminized seeds, but if you have regular seeds, read on!

1: Examining the Pre-Flowers
Pre-flowers expose the gender of your plant by around 6 weeks from seed, and as early as 3 weeks from cannabis seed for some plants. In this expanse, you’ll find pre-flowers packed at the nodes of the plant.

2: Using Clones
The following process can help you distinguish the gender of a plant even before pre-flowering. If you’re just growing 1, 2, or 3 plants, it can be unbearable to find out all your plants are male, and you need to begin over to produce buds so the earlier you can sex your plants, the better!
When cannabis seeds are still in the germination stage, there’s no way to determine which plants are male or female. You have to “wait and see.” Male cannabis plants eventually produce their pollen sacs, and female cannabis plants begin to develop white hairs that spread into the flowers that contain THC and other cannabinoids.

How to Sex Your Plants from Clones
You can wait until your plants simply show the earliest signs of their gender and then exclude all the males, but that means you have to inspect the plants continually until the first signs of their reproductive organs appear. A downside to this method is the time and energy wasted nurturing male plants. Again, unless you're breeding, get rid of all male plants right away.

• Take a clone from an unverified cannabis plant
• Mark both the clone and the mother plant, so you recognize which clone originated from which the corresponding mother. If you don’t label them clearly, then all your work will go to waste
• Once the clones have developed roots, grow just the clones into flowering mode by giving them a photo-period of 12 hours on and 12 hours off.
• The clones should start exposing their gender in a week or two. Males will start forming balls, and females will begin producing white hairs.
• Once you have determined the gender of your clones, you should make sure you remove and destroy male plants.

As a final thought, you need to be proactive and get rid off the male plants before they begin releasing pollen. You don’t want to waste your time an energy tending to plants you're going to get rid of anyway and you probably don't want your flower full of seeds. If this sounds like you, remember to sex your plants!

Growers Network would like to thank Shanta for providing this contributor article. What did you think? How do you sex your cannabis plants? Join our community of growers and start a conversation. Just click one of the "Join Now" buttons on this page. See you there!