Hey guys, my name is Dave. I’m the Director of Cultivation with Central Harvest and I wanted to do a quick video for you folks today breaking down the anatomy of the cannabis plant.
These plants are only about 14 days into flower, but they are a good example to show nodes, which is probably the first thing. “Nodes” are really any point where branches jump off of the main stock is called a node, and nodes are interesting, especially with the cannabis plant, because that is where you’ll first be able to see and identify what the sex of the plant is.
So in this case these are females, of course, in our flower rooms. These are the “stigmas” that start to jump off at the nodes, so as you can see this is kind of the main stock here, then we’ve got a branch that’s jumping off the side. So this is where the plant will show these “pistils,” and they’re protected by “bracts” which is basically a leafy shield that protects the reproductive organs, and eventually as the plant starts to develop more and more, the stigmas will start to show out of the pistols, and the stigmas are really like the hairlike strands that reach out for the male pollen if they were out in nature.
You can start to see it here, the stigmas that I’m talking about; the hair like structures that are jumping out of the pistils. You can see the hair here but this is still pretty early in development.
Now we’re going to jump over here to a different wave of plants. These are a little closer to half way through their flower cycle. They’re like 21 to 25 days, they’re starting to really stack the pistils which you can see here. There’s a lot more of those hairlike stigmas that are apparent, and you’re starting to see the “colas” form.
We really try to do a lot of topping so we don’t get that really dominant apical bud that you’ll see with some grows where they have really just one main bud. We try to spread the colas out evenly across all the plants.
So now we’re jumping over to another wave of plants, and you’re looking at more late-stage flower, whereas this wave is at about 7.5 to 8 weeks. They’re approaching their “fluff” stage where we stop feeding them nutrients.
You’re seeing “sugar leaves” and the resin-filled “trichomes” start to really present themselves. You know the sugar leaves are these smaller leaves which protrude out of the bud sites and really kind of help to hold the buds together. They get very trichome covered, whereas the “fan leaves” are larger, and they’re really just serving as the solar panels of the plant. They’re absorbing light energy and converting that, and carbon dioxide, and water into chemical energy for the plant. So these sugar leaves really are resin-covered along with the buds, and obviously the calyxes get really resin-covered as well.
