What are pistils?
Pistils are the fine hairs that grow out of the flowers of the female cannabis plant. Their job is to catch pollen from the males so the flower can form a seed. They are one of the easiest parts of a bud to recognize.
Each flower in the bud has a calyx, a small teardrop-shaped structure, and two little hairs usually grow out of each calyx. They are like small sticky antennae waiting for the wind to bring them pollen.
To get technical, what you see with the naked eye are the stigmas, the end part of the pistil. But in growing they are called pistils, and that is how they appear almost everywhere.
Pistils have very little resin. The aroma and potency are in the trichomes, not in them. That's why a bud with lots of orange hairs isn't necessarily more potent.
The first clue that it's a female
With regular seeds, which can give males or females, the pistils are how you find out early that a plant is female. At the start of flowering, little white hairs appear where the branches join the stem. Males, on the other hand, form little closed balls, which are pollen sacs.
What does the color of the pistils tell you?
At first they are white. As the plant ripens, they gradually darken and turn orange, reddish or brown, depending on the strain.
- Almost all white: the plant is still in full flowering.
- Many of them darkened: the plant is getting close to harvest.
It's a useful clue, but not a foolproof one: heat, handling or pollen can also darken them early. Many growers combine it with checking the trichomes and with the flowering time given on the product page.
Related terms
Before you grow, check the laws in your country: growing cannabis is not allowed everywhere.
