Although you're probably not on the farm the eve of your Beaver-Ducks civil war, i must express deep envy for your beautiful grow. Following a very similar system as yours, i'm interested in how you obtain such an even, full canopy. When you refer to 'bending' the side growth, are you super-cropping (stem break) or tying them down more LST style? Do you FIM at all? Thank you very much, and congrats on such an impressive mastery of technique.
I don't FIM because it causes my plants to be way too bushy and I end up cutting out a whole bunch of branches anyway.
I personally don't super crop. I see it as an extra level of stress I don't like putting on my plants. On the flip side though I have friends who super crop and have great success with it.
I start my training right from the point my clones are moved from little 4" round pots to the #2 sized pots that they will stay in.
Please excuse my diagram as I am a terrible artist. :winking0067:
But as you can see, when I re-pot my plants I put them in at a 45 degree angle. This starts them facing the way I want them to go. This also cuts down on the amount I have to bend them to keep them growing horizontally. Less bend = less stress. I then tie the main stem to the pot (this is the only LST I do).
Now what I do that is similar to super cropping is crushing the stem. The difference though is that I don't then pull the branch down so that it causes a 90 degree bend.
When I say crush, what I mean is gently putting pressure on the branch between two fingers just until the feel the first little pop that signals the branch is giving way. At this point the branch should still be able to stand up on its own, if it can't you over did it.
Now I do this "crushing" at several different spots on a branch, not just one like the super cropping technique. Several smaller crushes allows me to bend the branch without causing that harsh 90 degree angle. The goal is to keep the branches all at a perfect flat horizontal line. This way the plant can't tell which branch is at the highest elevation and thus causes the plant to put energy into all the side branches equally.
This "crushing" is only done with branches that are showing a lot of stretch an are flimsy. The majority of branches should be flimsy, they should be solid and shouldn't need crushing. For the ones that don't require the crushing I simple just bend them over. I start at the point on the branch that is closest to the main stem. Slowly bend and move your way out from the main stem bending all the way to the tip of the branch. If you try to do all your bending in only one spot on the branch instead of the entire length, you will break your branch. Breaking branches will happen with this technique and is not the end of the world. If you break one off, the energy will just be diverted to the other branches and everything will be fine.
Remember if your branches can't hold a straight horizontal position without support then you over did it with the "crushing" of the branch.
This technique will produce 20-30 medium to large sized bud sites as opposed to the vertical grow that produces 4-8 donkey sized colas. I like this for a few reasons.
1. You don't need a ton of head space in your grow room. You can get great yield without tall ceilings.
2. I don't run into mold problems as much as the people who grow the few super donkey sized buds. Ya they look pretty, but when you start trimming and find mold inside your donkey buds you end up having the throw a lot of precious bud out.
3. Unless you are growing 4-6 feet tall plants indoors, my technique will consistently produce more per plant.
Ok, that was a long post! Sorry I wrote a novel. :cool0041:
