This is my first grow, I have 5 plants (see proud pics!) and I am in day 11 of flowering under 400W HPS. I have made the classic mistake and let them get too tall in veg (6 weeks). 3 are fine so far, but two of my girlies are quite big now and are going to be too tall pretty soon for my grow space. If I start to do some gentle LST now will it harm them? It was a dumb mistake I know, but you live and learn and this grow is all about learning! Any advice would be appreciated. Oh... they are skunk #11, hydro grow in clay pebbles.
Those plants look great, i've never seen such a straight main stem like that, also if you want a few more bud colas for next time, you might want to top and fimm the plant a bit. It will be a bit bushier, but you'll get more budding nugs ! Cheers
You can train them but not like classic LST. You don't want to bring the main stalk parallel to the soil for example, it surely will snap. Tie it over at an angle until the string is taut and it feels like all the stem can bear for now. Leave it like that for several days then tighten a little, keep repeating until you have it over to a 60 or 45 degree angle. As an added benefit this will put more light directly on the secondary growth and fill out those budsites better.
Or even just sling a few wires across the room, then snap the stems and feed in and out of the wires. A bit like ScroG, they'll grow vertically from the horizontal branches. Just snap 'em, I say! -mu
^^as in, break the stems? not in half i mean, but like you said, literally snap and fold them into a screen? wouldn't that be high stress? or will the shock of a broken main stalk stop the vertical growth?
Not so they come away, but yes, snap them right over. After a day or so of repair work, the now horizontal stem will continue to grow, and all its side shoots will turn into colas in their own right. It doesn't seem to stress the plant at all; I guess they are adapted to having this kind of damage done, by hungry animals, shamanic humans, etc. Environmental extremes, like temperature fluctuations are much more stressful to a plant than cutting, snapping and chopping. Also, with the height equalized, by the wire/screen/string/whatever, you can lower the light to cover more buds evenly. You would be surprised, probably, at just how much bending a main stem can take, and while you might want to begin by trying to bend them under (threaded, so to speak, under-and-over) the wires, I wouldn't worry at all if they snapped. I did exactly this with a couple of unruly Sativas recently. Some bent, some snapped. They loved it. Snapping stems is an old supercropping technique. Crushing, too. -mu