Alright so I've been pretty intimidated bending these plants and cutting them but after doing hours of reading and watching I finally decided to just do it. Not sure if I'm on the right page here. I topped about half and FIMed the other half. I topped the taller ones with mainly one cola and fimmed the short plants that had multiple colas or bud sites. I think..lol. Anyways they are at about 5 weeks from seed. Was planning on going another 2-3 weeks before looking into switching to flowering. Did I do an alright job here or do I need to modify my stress training? I feel like maybe some of the wire is too tight? I'm trying to bend and grow the main stem more at an angel to get that bushy-like plant going. I also tried to get some of the leaves out of the way but not sure I did so great of a job. Basically I just want to know if this looks productive for my plants or not. Thanks for any advice. First grow so I'm still learning a lot.
my only concern is the amount of plants you have combined with that technique. Typically those techniques are used to widen the footprint of the plant under the light to increase efficiency. Thing's are going to get tight quickly without a plan... do you have one?
With this being my first grow I went a little overboard when I germinated the seeds in case I made errors or accidentally killed some plants along the way. There's 12 right now in a 4x4 and I've been hoping the males will start showing signs here shortly so I can pull them out and make more room. Ideally I was hoping to end up with 6 plants, two of each strain. There are one or two plants I'm thinking of killing regardless if they are male/female but I was going to wait just in case my luck isn't so great on getting girls. I was planning on transplanting to 3gallon pots with 4-6 plants after I know the sex and am ready to start flowering.
I just assumed they were feminized, sounds like you have a plan lol! Do you plan on cloning? Running another cycle after this?
Haha in hindsight I wish I would have gone with feminized seeds. I'm glad I didn't start with autos because I messed up in the beginning and let the seedlings sit in rooters in a dome for too long they stretched like crazy and a number didn't make it. Go figure my biggest fuckup was one of the beginning/easiest steps lol. I feel like they should be a little bigger for week 5-ish but they all seem healthy. Not sure about cloning. I have 12 seeds left of these three strains so I may just pop those for the next grow. It would be kind of cool to grow back to back and see how improved the second go-around is. I'm planning on buying another tent 4x2 to stick in the unfinished closet and run some HLG QB lights. I'll start germinating/vegging right after I flip the main tent to 12/12. Then when I harvest, hopefully the plants in the veg tent are ready to be moved. I'm hoping to upgrade the lights in my main tent at some point too. Ideally I wanted to get 2-3 grows out of the mh/hps to get my money's worth and not have to buy new bulbs but instead invest in LED. My electric has already doubled so I'm getting anxious on LEDs now.
Yeah that's what i was thinking as far as getting a cycle going. I don't have any experience sexing male plants, as I've always used clones/femz, but can you tell if it's a male prior to flipping the lights to 12/12? If so, once you pull the males i would highly recommend cloning each plant that way if any of them stick out from the rest, such as heavy yielder /faster grower/ biggest plant/ etc... you could quickly make a main run out of the favorable genetics. If you don't want to run it anymore but want to keep the genetics running, you can give it away so that if needed later you can get a cutting back.