ok, i have 5 big bud females that i got from weedseeds.net growing under a 600w HPS. they were vegged for 6 weeks and have flowered for almost 2. i have a growing concern because of the size of them, the tallest is almost as tall as me with the pot (5 gallon) and i hover around 6ft. i'm guessing that when they were younger (and along with 3 other males) they covered eachother up too much so they tried to beat eachother to the light. i have the light on chains and it is as high as it will go and the tops of the plants are already too close to it. today I decided to prune the plants and stake them. i twist tied the main stalk of each plant to the stake which i placed quite close to it, in strategic places which attempt to curb upward growth. i also pruned them by taking off every fan leaf that connected to the main stalk in an attempt to encourage outward growth. this is my first grow and i am simply going off of what i read on the internet. everyone elses plants at this stage are much shorter. i know you're not supposed to prune while flowering but i don't know what to do. if this doesn't work i was considering tying the plant down somehow or toping them. its hard to give advice without pictures, but i was just wondering if anyone else has encountered a similar situation with an answer to it. pictures to come in a week when i see them next, sorry i don't have them now.
You heard right, you don't want to prune during flowering, especially the fan leaves. Those are what stores the energy the plant uses to produce/fatten up the buds. About all you can do is to start carefully pulling the plant over and tying it down.
You're going to have to tie your plants down. In the future make sure that your light is as lose as possible to the plants to prevent the plants from stretching. Like TTT said dont prue or top, its too late for that and you need all the leaves you can have to absorb the light. The good news is that there should be very little vertical growth from this point onwards. In th future you may want to top several times during the veg period to keep the plants shorter and maybe go 24/0 instead of 18/6
well this new information has nearly made me sick ... for some reason it just made sense in my mind that it would be easier for the plants to produce buds because they could focus their energy on bud production instead of maintaining those big fan leaves. i literally removed every single fan leaf that attached to the main stalk! ok, so what should i expect now, stunted plant/bud growth? and how will i go about tying them down? just take some string and tie it to the top of the plant and tie it to a hole in the top of the pot or something and decrease string length each day maybe??? i considered doing something like that i just hate to put the top cola so low i guess... thanks a lot for your help guys i'm sure i'll need more!
that guy is on crack....alot of growers remove their fan leaves once flowering starts....you need the light to hit the BUD not the fan leaves...sometimes fan leaves get in the way.....you wont see much of a difference,you might even see an improvment...i mean there does need to be some leaves though...
well i hope you're right, they have definitely been stunted though, which i suppose is to be expected. they've taken a little while to recover but at least most of them have. one isn't looking too well though. i will have pictures of them on here late in the weekend or early next week. i'll be looking for advice on how to tie them down if i should, and what to do to them in general to get the best results.
well as you can see one of plants has leaves that have curled under really bad, i'm pretty sure its due to over watering, hopefully it will be ok. you can also see that some of them are taller than the bottom of the light, like 6ft tall. if i should tie these down, how should i go about it? any suggestions?