The Marijuana plant which is also known as Cannabis or Hemp is a wind-pollinated plant and can contain either staminate (male parts) or pistillate (female parts), however, there also exist some less common hermaphrodites where the plant has developed both male and female parts within the same plant body.

What does weed look like?

As stated above, Marijuana grows up to be one of 3 genders. It is a plant that completes its life cycle in one growing season, it begins as a seed, sprouts, blooms, and then dies. Cannabis is generally speaking green, brown, gray, or a variation of one of these, with other colors occurring at lower rates.

However, in the recent History of Cannabis labs and individual growers have crossed and created strains in different colors such as pink, purple, red, white, white, yellow, etc. depending on their properties and potency. Read more about colorful Cannastrains.

 The plant itself grows stems of flowers and leaves. A cannabis leaf is typically not what a user is after, what a cannasoiuer would desire are the buds of flowers. The plant can grow up to 8-10 ft with long leaves and dense tight buds, the buds are covered with a frosty coat of something called trichomes this gives the flower a crystallized look and sticky texture. This powdery substance is also Keif, which people smoke in different parts of the world.

How to identify the cannabis plant’s gender:

What does a male marijuana plant look like? 

The male cannabis plant is also known as the male Kush plant. It can be identified only after the first 6 weeks or so of growth, before this, you may find yourself wondering what does a male weed plant looks like? Do I want a male or a female plant? So, after roughly 6 weeks, you can finally look and knock yourself out with a stoned gender reveal. 

As you look from the untrained eye at a skinny stem with a few branches and leaves sticking out and are wondering what do I even look for? All you need to do is look at where the leaves and branches meet the main stem. That’s where you will see what distinguishes male from female plants. The sure telltale sign that you have a male plant is that the plant will start growing tiny ball-looking sacs, what you find in these sacs is the pollen that is needed to reproduce and grow more plants. 

Check out this cool video below (For all you visual learners out there)

Why is any of this important? 

Well, for one thing, when it comes to human consumption, only the female plants produce the buds that people harvest for consumption. The male plant is only useful for making new baby plants through pollination, which is no longer necessary since many growers have moved on to simply cloning the female plant and needing to carefully keep the male plants away from the female plants to keep the crops consistent.

 Now that you know what the male plant looks like, you can confidently say that there are no male marijuana flowers, no male buds, no male cannabis flowers, the only thing other than stems branches and leaves that a male plant grows is the pollen sac, meaning that if you are growing for human consumption and don’t need to produce through pollination you can simply get rid of it, since only the female plant will produce the flowers/buds used for consumption.

What is a hermaphrodite marijuana plant?

A hermaphrodite plant started as female and turned hermaphrodite due to stress and as a method of survival, while this plant can in theory grow flowers/buds these will be full of seeds and deemed to be of very poor quality and can end up ruining your crop if you allow the hermaphrodite to grow along with the rest of the female plants. 

Check out the pictorial representation.

Our final thoughts

If you are aiming to grow marijuana for human consumption, you will need to be an expert at identifying all 3 genders of plants, male, female, and hermaphrodite as your goal will be to protect and isolate your female flowers from being pollinated by the males and hermaphrodites. However, if you are looking to grow marijuana for its fiber or hemp seeds then this isn’t as important since the goal will be to simply grow as much as you can as fast as you can to produce paper, clothing, textiles, animal feed, hemp milk, oil protein powder, etc. since the flowers are only necessary when you are trying to use it as a recreational drug.