Every grower knows that pollination isn’t a good thing for their cannabis batch. This is because once the female plants are pollinated, they will start producing seeds instead of focusing on producing quality buds.
But, thankfully, this seedy and unfortunate final product can be prevented by using a few basic techniques. In this blog, we will take a look at some of the aspects to help you harvest only quality buds at the end of the season.
How to tell if the female is pollinated?
One of the early signs of pollinated female plants is larger bracts. Bracts are small, leaf-like structures that safeguard the female reproductive parts. This is even the part from where the flowering buds appear.
An easy test to conduct is grabbing one pie face strain’s bract and opening it up with a pair of tweezers. If you find seeds inside, then your plant is pollinated.
Another sign is the color of pistil hair. Once the female is pollinated, her once white hairs will start shriveling and turn darker.
You can even check the pistils of your pie face strain. These hair-like structures change color from white to dark orange to red over time during the flowering phase. On being exposed to pollen, the pistils’ tip turns dark, whereas the stalk remains white.
How to prevent pollination in the first place?
To undergo pollination, the batch must have male plants or hermaphrodites. The first thing you can do to prevent pollination is, of course, getting rid of males or hermies as soon as you can.
During the first three weeks of flowering, it is important to check for possible males in your batch.
A typical grower will never let the males linger around as soon as he finds one. However, cannabis breeders may do otherwise. They may separate the males and females to prevent accidental pollination. In fact, the males are kept as far as possible from the females because even wind can carry pollens around.
How to detect the male cannabis plant in the batch?
You will require waiting until the pre-flowering phase to determine the male plants. Compared to male plants, female plants take a little longer to show their gender signs.
At the location where males grow their buds, females end up developing white hairs.
Unlike female plants, male plants develop sacs of pollen instead of hairs. These pollen sacks look a lot similar to tiny balls. These balls can appear alone or in clusters based on how far along the pre-flowering stage is. In the later stage, these pollen sacs will burst open, spilling out the pollen seeds, therefore pollinating the females.
Over to you
It is evident that one of the easy ways of preventing pollination is by spotting the males in the batch and then taking the right measures to prevent the pollination procedure.
If you want to stay away from the hassle of spotting males, then opt to grow feminized seeds instead.
