I’ve been told that all flowering plants produce fruit. Does cannabis produce a fruit if not cultivated to be smoked? If so, what does it look like? Is it edible? Limited googling just shows smokeable weed, and I’m already good with that.
It’s seeds, quite small. They can be pressed for oil and used for cooking.
The seeds are the fruit? I would have thought the seeds grow into plants, which flower, then produce a fruit which then produces the seeds. I’m not a botanist, obviously, that’s just what I remember from school a million years ago.
The seeds aren’t literally the fruit, but there are a lot of plants where the fruit is very tiny, and taken up almost entirely by the actual seed, and it’s common parlance to refer to the whole fruit as the “seed”.
No. The fruits are small and dry, though, so are mostly seed. The technical term is achene.
Think buckwheat or quinoa, or some spices like cumin, fennel or caraway.
They differ from grains like wheat or corn in that the fruit part (pericarp - what was the ovary wall) is not fused to the seed part (what was the ovule).
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Coriander (cilantro) does it too.
At the end of the summer, I let my coriander bolt so I can harvest and dry the seeds to be ground for Indian and other cooking.
Never saw it myself, but a friend told me years ago he saw a PBS or National Geographic show about a family in a tribe or some remote setting in another country (Thailand?) where they routinely used cannabis oil for cooking. The host of the show stayed for dinner, and afterward was so high he could hardly move, while the family went about their typical after-dinner activities, having built up a strong tolerance for the effects.
I add hemp seed oil to my morning protein shake. It’s an excellent source of Omega 3 fatty acids.
Cannabis oil is different than hemp seed oil. Hemp seed oil doesn’t get a person high. It’s my understanding that cannabis oil is processed from the flowering buds, not the seeds.
Fruit in that sense is a technical term, and doesn’t necessarily mean anything recognizable as a fruit in the sense of the fruit department in a grocery store, or “five fruits a day”, or a fruit bowl.
Hemp also has next to no psychoactive properties. It’s basically the same plant as psychoactive cannabis, but has been bred for fiber and/or oilseed, not for THC. The plant generally called hemp isn’t going to get anybody high other than possibly by placebo effect, whatever part is used.
Not quite, coriander is a schizocarp, not an achene. It has multiple (2) seeds in one fruit, that splits when ripe.
It seems I was wrong, though, and fennel is also a schizocarp, not an achene. It gets tricky with that whole umbellifer family, they can vary at which stage the individual carpels separate.
… mm-Must be this beer I’m drinkin’. I had about eight. Teen.
Here in the midwest ditches for many years were filled with hemp. Marihuana. Wacky Tobaccy. It was planted in huge quantities to make rope and cordage. Huge, prodigious quantities of seeds, I don’t believe there was ever any psychoactive properties. It there was, the farmboys would have made a killin’.
But the birds! They really love the hemp seed.
My first Iowa visit was in the fall, seeded hemp plants everywhere. As a former Cal grower, I kinda freaked until host explained the reality. I made a corn cob pipe right there and tried my best to feel something. Just, headache… Amazing what messing with a plants DNA (selective breeding can do)
Hemp seeds are sold as a good salad topping in many places. Nice crunchy flavors.