Growing Marijuana is an art that needs knowledge and patience. If you are new to the field, it is advisable to take time and learn the basics of Marijuana farming.
Basically, Cannabis plants have two life stages:
- The vegetative stage
- Flowering stage
The other crucial thing to understand is that there are male and female marijuana plant species. Only the female produces buds, and again, these buds will be half male and half female. https://shop.ilovegrowingmarijuana.com/products/jack-herer-marijuana-seeds needless cultivation time because they already have their male and female components.
This simply means that if you do not personally engineer the Marijuana growing process, you will end up with half useless seeds. The simple and yet effective way to make sure that 100% of the seeds and the plants you use in your farm are female and hence productive, is feminization.
Here are crucial tips and guidelines on how you feminize your marijuana plants.
The Basics of Marijuana Cultivation
There are two main stages in the life of the cannabis plant. The first is the vegetative stage and the second is the flowering stage. You cannot tell the plant’s gender during the first stage or the vegetative stage. However, at about six weeks, the plant will start forming pre-flowers, and that is when you will gauge whether the plant is male or female.
- During the pre-flowering stage, the male plants will produce ball-shaped buds. On the other hand, the female ones will produce a more slender bud, which resembles the regular female pistil of a flower.
- Any plants that do not reveal their gender during this pre-flowering stage will proceed with the entire growth process, and the gender will only be apparent when you switch the lights to 12=12 and the plants start producing flowers.
Characteristics of the Female Marijuana Plant
There are certain physical characteristics which are only found in the female Marijuana plant:
- The plant takes longer to produce flowers when you change it to flowering.
- The plant will have a few wispy and white hairs when the bud which becomes the pistil starts forming.
- The Bud sprouts at the joint which connects the stem with the branches
How do you Feminize Cannabis Seeds?
The male and female cannabis plants are needed for the reproduction process to complete. However, this is more effective when you have the same plant producing both the male pollen sacks and having the female parts. So, feminizing a cannabis plant is forcing the female plant to get the male reproductive parts.
When you feminize a cannabis plant, you make self-pollination possible and eliminate the space and other resources you would have otherwise wasted on growing a mixture of male and female plants.
There are two main ways that you can feminize a cannabis plant:
- You can use colloidal silver or gibberellic acid to induce the plant to make its own pollen sacs.
- Use the natural method where you do not harvest the buds on time, or the plant is stressed and it starts making its own bananas.
Scientists do not recommend the second method because the resulting buds will not be good in quality.
Making Feminized Seeds Using Colloidal Silver
Colloidal silver is basically a suspension of silver in water. It is easily available in stores and you can also buy it online as a health supplement.
Here is the simple five-step process which you can follow to help you feminize your plants:
- Check to ensure that the colloidal silver solution you have bought has the right silver concentration. Wait for three or four weeks to pass after your plants have started flowering, and then start the spraying process.
To spray the plant, put the solution in a spray pump and drench the bud sites of the known female plants with the solution. Switch to the 12-12 light schedule and keep spraying the colloidal silver solution. Any untreated sites on the plant will develop female buds as usual but do not harvest for smoking as they could be contaminated with the colloidal silver.
- Keep spraying the buds that you chose to feminize until it matures. You will know that the pollen has matured when the sacs swell like a ball and start bursting open. You can harvest the pollen sacs directly and dry them for a week. When they are completely dry, you will just shake them and collect the pollen.
- Use the pollen which you have collected from the second stage of the feminization process to pollinate another female plant which has had flowers for two to three weeks. Do not try to use the pollen to pollinate the original plant because by the time the pollen is ready, the flowers will be too old, and the quality of the seeds will be reduced. When you pollinate a new plant early enough, it gets the time needed to develop enough seeds. It will also be genetically superior to the self-pollinated plant.
- Wait for a month and a half after the pollination for the new plant buds to mature and get seeds. These are the seeds you will harvest and use to grow already feminized cannabis.
This is a process that you can also carry out using gibberellic acid as mentioned. The acid is produced by a fermentation process that activates fungi to break down plant material into the building blocks of the acid.
One of the most common natural sources of the acid is rice. You simply ferment the rice and use the resulting culture in place of the silver solution when drenching the buds of the cannabis plant that you want to feminize.
Conclusion
It makes more economic sense to have a strain of cannabis, which is already feminized, as it will produce the best quality buds for recreational and even medical use. The feminization process needs a lot of attention to detail, but once you have accomplished it, you get a lifetime supply of superior quality seeds. If you are not sure about the feminization process, consult online forums, and other growing experts who have carried out the process before.
