How the Cannabis Plant Works
A plain-English tour of the cannabis plant: roots, stems, leaves, flowers and trichomes, and how a plant moves from growing leaves to making flowers.
Every product on our menu starts as a living plant. Knowing how that plant is built, and how it grows, makes it much easier to understand the words on a menu: buds, colas, trichomes, smalls, kief and more.
The parts of the plant
- Roots take in water and nutrients from the soil or growing medium.
- The main stem carries water up and sugars down, and holds the plant upright. Branches grow from nodes, the points along the stem where leaves and side shoots start.
- Fan leaves are the big, familiar leaves with long fingers. They catch light and make the plant's food. They're removed at harvest and don't end up in the products you buy.
- Flowers, also called buds, are what growers harvest. The largest cluster at the top of a branch is called a cola.
- Sugar leaves are the small leaves that grow out of the buds. They're coated in resin, which is why they look frosted, or "sugary".
- Pistils are the fine hairs on the flowers. They start out white and darken to orange or brown as the flower matures.
Male and female plants
Cannabis plants are usually either male or female. Female plants make the resin-rich flowers that are dried and sold. Male plants make pollen. If pollen reaches a female flower, the flower starts making seeds instead of putting its energy into resin, so growers keep male plants well away from the grow room.
Many growers start new plants from clones: cuttings taken from a healthy female "mother" plant and rooted. A clone is an exact genetic copy of its mother, so each batch grows the same way and has the same character.
From leaves to flowers
A cannabis plant has two main stages.
- Vegetative stage. The plant grows roots, stems and leaves, getting bigger and stronger.
- Flowering stage. The plant stops putting most of its energy into leaves and starts making flowers.
Outdoors, flowering begins as late-summer days get shorter. Indoors, growers control this with the lights: plants get long days to grow, then the daily light is cut back, often to about twelve hours, to start flowering. Flowering usually takes about eight to ten weeks, depending on the strain.
Trichomes: where it all happens
Look closely at a bud and you'll see it's covered in tiny, glittering bumps. These are trichomes, small resin glands that make and store the plant's cannabinoids, such as THC and CBD, and its terpenes, the compounds behind its aroma.
As the plant ripens, the trichome heads change from clear to cloudy, and some turn amber. Growers watch them with a magnifier to decide when to harvest.
Trichomes are also the starting point for many products. Kief is trichomes sifted off dried flower. Hash and rosin are made by collecting trichomes and pressing them together. Our article on bubble hash vs. temple balls shows two very different ways of doing that.
After harvest
Harvested flower isn't ready yet. It's dried slowly, trimmed, and then cured for weeks before it's sold. We cover that in drying and curing flower.
See it at New Mill
We grow, trim and cure every plant ourselves at the mill in Bethel. See photos of the plants as they grow on our grow room page, or browse our flower and pre-rolls.
New Mill is a medical cannabis dispensary in Bethel, Maine, serving qualifying patients 18 and older from Maine or another state, with a valid medical cannabis certification and photo ID from the same state. This article is general information about the plant, not medical advice.