Why Do I Need to Know?

There’s one important reason why you need to know the sex of your plants. Male plants mostly produce pollen that makes your female plants produce seeds.Female plants are the ones that produce the big, fat buds you’re looking for.

When you’re growing, you need to be sure you’re only using feminized plants. If you have male plants mixed in with your females, they will not produce any buds and you might ruin your female plants.

That’s because if there are mature female and male plants in close proximity, the male plant will pollinate the female plant. When that happens, she starts producing tons of seeds. So, if you’d like to maximize your usable bud, and coax your plants into producing fat, seed-free flowers, then you’ve got to carefully identify what sex your plants are. Once that’s done, you need to remove all the male plants before they start pollinating the female ones.

How To Tell The Sex of Your Cannabis Plants

When your plants turn six weeks old, it’s time to figure out what sex they are. To do this, look at all the joints where branches and stems connect.This is where the tell-tale signs will first show up.

If a plant is male, little balls will start showing up at the joints between branches. As they grow larger they’ll start to resemble clusters of grapes. These are actually the pollen sacs. If the plant reaches the flowering stage, these sacs will open up and the pollen will spread all over the place. If it happens to land on a female plant, it will fertilize the flowers and they’ll start to produce a lot of seeds.

On the other hand, if your plant is female, it will not produce those little balls. Instead, look for a wispy, white, hair-looking thing to show up at the joints of branches. These are the plant’s pistils, and they’ll eventually pave the way for your plant to start producing buds.

Every one in a while, you’ll find a plant that grows both pollen sacs and feminized pistils. If this is the case, move the plant away from your other females because its pollen sacs will eventually open up. These plants will often pollinate themselves, but they’ll also pollinate any other female plants in the vicinity.

Isolate Female Plants

Once you know the sex of all your plants, you’ve got to isolate the female ones. If you want usable bud, these are the only plants you should be growing.

Simply remove all the male plants and any plants that produce both pistils and pollen sacs. At this point, your grown operation should be full of only healthy,strong female plants.

Now it’s just a matter of keeping them well fed and helping them grow into the flowering phase.Once they reach that stage, they’ll start producing beautiful, crystal-covered flowers.

Buy Feminized Seeds

One final thing. If you want to avoid all of this, you can always buy feminized seeds from a reliable seed seller. These seeds should only produce female plants.

Even if you go this route, you should still double check your plants when they’re six weeks old. Nature is unpredictable, and it’s not uncommon for a male plant to sneak in.

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Cannabis is an annual plant, meaning it goes through its entire life cycle, from seed to seed, within the space of a year. In the case of cannabis, in the right growing conditions, this will be closer to 4-10 months.

Stage 1: Germination

Germinating refers to the act of sparking growth within your cannabis seeds. When a seed germinates, the seed’s embryo breaks through the shell of the seed to form a root. This root fixes itself in your growing medium, allowing it to push itself upwards. As it grows taller, two embryonic leaves will form to start receiving light. This whole process can take anywhere between 12 hours to 2 weeks. Once germination is complete, the cannabis plant will enter the seedling stage of its life.

Stage 2: Seedling

Now that the cannabis plant is receiving light through its embryonic leaves, it will focus its energy into producing a more substantial foliage. It will start to produce 3 fingered leaves, making it start to look like a cannabis plant. As the seedling continues to grow, more and more of these leaves will start to form.

Depending on the strain, you may find that some seedlings have quite a weak steam, and struggle to deal with the weight. If this is the case, you can prop it up by using a thin wooden stake and a little bit of thread until it has a stronger structure. The seedling stage often lasts 1 to 3 weeks; you will know it is done when your cannabis plant has created 4 to 8 new leaves during this time.

Stage 3: Vegetative Growth

The vegetative stage is one of the major phases of cannabis growth. This is the stage where the plants really flesh out, and focus on maximum growth before they flower.During this time of their lives, cannabis plants will require a lot of energy, and need a lot of light and nutrition to produce it.

It is during this stage that the plant really takes on the form of a cannabis plant, and will grow rapidly in both height and width, producing a thicker stem with more branches and fully fingered leaves. This growth will maximize the plant’s ability to produce flowers with its increased surface area for light exposure, and structural integrity.

The sex of the cannabis will also begin to be distinguishable at the end of this stage, allowing for the male plants to be removed from the grow area before they have the chance to release their pollen – if left with the female plants, you will get a yield of seeds instead of bud.

The whole vegetative stage will usually take anywhere between 1 to 5 months to complete.

Stage 4: Pre-Flowering

This stage is more of a sub-stage, which takes place just before the cannabis plant puts its effort into flowering. During this time the cannabis continues to flesh out, shifting its focus into branch and node development – in order to support the biggest load bud it can. You will know this is happening when you start to see calyx beginning to form at the nodes (where the branches and stem ). This phase of the life cycle can last from 1 day up to 2 weeks.

Stage 5: Flowering

This is the stage every cannabis grower is waiting for, and is the last major step of the cannabis life cycle. It’s time for your plants to produce bud. During this phase, the sex of your cannabis will be clearly visible, and if you see any missed males cropping up, make sure you remove them quickly and carefully, before they have the chance to disperse their pollen. A male plant will produce little clusters of balls, filled with pollen, whereas the female plants will start to put their efforts into producing their flowers with little white pistils. This entire stage can take anywhere between 1 to 4 months depending on the strain you are growing.

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Caprice Sweatt, founder and CEO of Medical Cannabis Outreach, said the facility will open in early December, most likely inc Carbondale, although the location is still to be determined.

Before the opening, the group plans to hold two educational seminars in the area to explain the application process and to educate the public on the drug’s medical uses.

On June 30, Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a bill extending Illinois’ medical marijuana pilot program by 2½ years. The bill also added post-traumatic stress disorder and terminal illness to the list of qualifying medical conditions, which now total 41.

Under the new law, doctors are no longer required to state in recommendations that it is their “professional opinion” that a patient will receive a “therapeutic or palliative benefit” from medical marijuana. They simply have to verify that the patient has a state-recognized qualifying condition.

However, Southern Illinois’ major health care providers – including Southern Illinois Healthcare, Heartland Regional Medical Center and Southern Illinois University School of Medicine – have been hesitant ti back the program. Major health systems and smaller providers have directed physicians not to certify patients for medical marijuana, citing legal concerns.

“This is why we are moving into the area, because there are so many patients in dire need and physicians that are associated with the medical groups in that area that are refusing to sign off,” Sweatt said. “This is a legal medical program, and it’s really disappointing that so many physicians literally refuse to take a look at it,”

In addition to obtaining a physician’s recommendation, patients must undergo a fingerprint-based background check, obtain proof of residency and pay a $300 application fee.

Medical Cannabis Outreach, which travels all over the state to conduct educational seminars, will help patients through each step of the application process and refer them to cannabis-friendly physicians for certification.

“We advocate for the patient, we hold their hand through the whole process, and we make sure they actually get their card in their hand,” Sweatt said.

Medical Cannabis Outreach has also partnered with local marijuana dispensaries Thrive Harrisburg and Thrive Anna to help educate patients.

“I think there’s a lot of people who are curious about the program, especially the new changes that went into effect recently. it’s about education and awareness,” said Thrive co-owner Rosie Naumovski.

A longtime supporter of medical cannabis, Sweatt has used marijuana to treat her Crohn’s disease for the pas 25 years.

“I was on 22 medications a day. I went off all my medications at the age of 25, and I’ve been prescription drug-free since then,” she said.

“I’ve just made it my life’s mission, honestly, to inform people of what happened to me, and we encourage people to be truthful about their own story, because people hide what’s happened to them, too.”

The group’s first educational seminar will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 10, in Carbondale Public Library. The second seminar will take place at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 14, in Mount Vernon Public Library. Both events are free and open to the public.

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For decades, traditional indoor grow lights have been high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps. The same sodium lamps that lights up a majority of the world’s city streets have been used in grow rooms from San Diego to Denver and Syracuse. Meant to mimic the intense rays of the sun, flowering rooms that are equipped with HIDs, require continuous air conditioning and de-humidification. All of the usage, however, translate to excessive power wastage. LED lighting, on the other hand, consumes less electricity and emits far less heat, which means greater return to the grower’s bottom line.

As a common saying goes: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, there is a pervasive reticence to switch to new tech and invite the high cost of re-outfitting a grow room. However, with the ever-expanding effects of global warming, and the rising cost of electricity, LEDs are in the spotlight as a more sustainable approach to indoor cultivation.

Head grower Kevin Biernacki at The Grove Nevada’s 50,000-sqft cultivation facility was interested in LED and looking for low-heat, cost-effective lighting during the manufacture of their vertical–grow site in Las Vegas. “We really needed a multi-tiered system that wouldn’t cook the roots above,” he said.

Stacking grow racks in tiers means the Grove can double or triple their square footage – and vastly increase profits at the same time. Biernacki says he went through a host of LED companies, putting east to the test with a side-by-side independent lamp test. He explains why, after an exhaustive search, they ended up purchasing 650 LED grow lights from the company, Heliospectra.

“It really came down to grams per watt,” he says. “Also, we liked that Heliospectra lights allow you to customize light recipes, which other people simply don’t have.”

The Grove is now able to design light combinations that mimic sunrise, mid-day and sunset, combined with a “far red push” during the last few weeks of flowering. “The last three weeks of harvest we were able to push the light spectrum a little differently,” says Biernacki. “At the very end, we are getting that far red and we were able to speed up the product to harvest.”

Affective harvest times by as much as one full week from a 10-week flowering period, the amount of money saved speak for itself. Biernacki says it was also important to the grove to consult other commercial cultivators who use Heliospectra’s LED lights, and found that the growers were “continually expanding their number of Heliospectra lights. We obviously lookrf at that as very positive<" he says. "It was a little daunting at first to learn how to manipulate lighting," says Biernacki, "but we soon learned that with the click of a button we could change the light recipes." He adds that the Grove's first. He adds that the Grove's first harvest with LEDs yield a strain with 10% myrcene cannabinoid level and another boasting and incredible 31.4% of THC. The unprecedented level of control over grow rooms that LED lights give cultivators is a giant leap forward for cannabis tech. Rapid return on investment, cutting down on wasteful energy bills and increased control over cannabinoids levels could very well change the entire cannabis growing paradigm as we know it.

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So what does autoflowering mean? This variety of cannabis will automatically flower under almost any light. These plants don’t need the 12/12 light cycle to start producing flowers and can even grow under 24 hours of light.

The Ruderalis plant is a wild variety of the cannabis Sativa.  It is a small bushy plant that has adapted to automatically flower. The plant reaches full maturity anywhere from 8 to 11 weeks in harsh climates and almost any growing conditions. The first autoflowering plants were found in the former Soviet Union and they were some leftover hemp plants. They’ve since then adapted to their harsh environment. Now you can find Ruderalis plants all over the world. These strong plants are well adapted to the diseases and insects that surround them. They do everything to flower ASAP and produce flowers and seeds faster than any Sativa or Indica plant.

Although the wild Ruderalis plants contain little or no THC. Breeders from all over the world have produced autoflower strains by crossbreeding these wild varieties with some of the best commercial strains. After countless failures those breeders managed to perfect that crossbreeding and now the market is flooded with autoflowers. New and exciting autoflowering seeds are released into the market as plants are cross-bred.

The best part is that these strains can be ready to harvest in 60 days from seed. It stays between 50 to 100 cm and contain 20 to 30% THC.

Automatic cannabis is becoming the next big thing in the grower’s community but not just due to its fast growth.  It doesn’t need the light cycle to change.  This eliminates the need for growing rooms for plans that are flowering and those that are in the vegetative stage.

Beginner growers might find this type to suit them just fine. This plant stays small and can be grown in small growing spaces stealthily. It is also very strong and resilient, so beginner mistakes won’t do any damage.

That is why the Ruderalis plant will most likely recover from things like:

• Over or Underwatering
• Potbound roots
• Temperature fluctuations
• Transplanting
• Nutrient burns
• Other stresses and mishaps

Why should you use autoflowering cannabis?

This particular question is discussed more and more as these strains expand their reach and become more mainstream. Now you can find almost any successful strain cross-bred to produce autoflowering seeds to have both the Ruderalis and plant traits in them.

Why do so many people choose autoflowers over the regular Indica and Sativa?

There isn’t a single correct answer for this question. There are many advantages to these autoflower plants as they have some strains that regular cannabis plants just don’t have.

Fast growth and short life cycle

The first point why people choose autoflowering cannabis could be that their life cycle is pretty short. The fastest autoflower plants can grow from seed to full maturity in under 60 days and that gives limitless possibilities to indoor and outdoor growers.

For example, if you plant regular seeds and some autoflowering seeds side by side, the small bushy plants are ready to harvest long before the regular strains start to produce flowers. It also makes the autoflowers less likely to be damaged by critters, bugs, diseases and even inexperienced growers and harsh weather conditions.

The short turnaround of autoflowering cannabis plants indoors, can be properly exploited to have some continuous harvest setups.

Small size

These dwarf plants are harder to spot outdoors due to their small size and that makes them less likely to be detected by other growers, law enforcement, tourists or other troublemakers.
Indoors, these little plants can have a big advantage to growers who have limited space for growing or growers who want to produce their bud stealthily. These short autoflowering seeds will produce plants that can be grown in almost any space and an empty closet or refrigerator will be just fine. However, small plant growing even goes so far as growing them in PC cases and ice boxes, referred to as micro growing. Even if these micro growers don’t get much yield, they are still growing cannabis and autoflower seeds are the only ones who make it possible.

Advantages of autoflower plants

The advantage that characterizes all Ruderalis plants is that they can automatically flower under almost any light cycle. This means that indoor growers don’t need don’t need separate grow-rooms for plans that are in the vegetative stage and those who are flowering. Commercial growers can even put autoflower plants in their vegging room and get some nice bud before harvesting their regular strains.

In the outdoors environment, autoflowering seeds give growers multiple harvests every season and it allows cannabis to be grown in climates where regular strains wouldn’t be able to mature in time.

Autoflower Breeding and Seed Productions

Autoflowers are easier to breed and produce seeds because they are small and their life cycle is short. By breeding autoflowers, you can get roughly 250 seeds from a plant that is just 7 inches tall and you can get them in two months.

Breeding autoflowering strains can be done much faster than with regular strains. This is due to the regular strain which takes 5 to 6 months from seed to harvest, while you can grow two autoflower crops from start to finish and therefore make more stable hybrids faster.

As you can probably realize by now, autoflowers give growers new possibilities and perspective or cannabis growing. As the law changes, more and more people are growing and using the plant. Their first growing experiences will have to be small and the plants strong. These autoflowers are perfect for those situations.

Sources:

• Wikipedia
• The Weed Blog
• HowToGrowMarijuana.com

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