This allows you to maximize your yield, by allowing the budding parts of the plant to receive sufficient light and air.
And to increase the number of bud growth sites. When you top the plant it splits into two, top those and you have four, and so on. Keeps them at a lower profile and drastically increases Bud growth sites
ah, fair enough but wouldn't it be better just to pinch and bend the plant over? besides that, doesn't it take 3-5 days for it to grow a new top? time that could be spent on an untopped plant?
Unlike Outdoor plants, Indoor plant's don't have a looming flowering date. Without a time limit on your grow there's all type of wonderfull growing methods you can employ to maximise yield, or make the best use of an availible grow space.
How do you know that topped plants increases yield over untopped plants given the same amount of time. I would expect an untopped plant to have higher yields because it didn't take the time to regrow another top. Am I wrong to think that supercropping ( pinching and turning a plant) has lower yields than a topped plant over the same amount of time?
Yes, I believe if you were doing a side by side comparison then a normal plant would yield more than a plant that had been fimmed/topped/super cropped if given the same amount of Veg time. Yield increase is related to the developement of more budding sites over time. It would still have the benefits of Size manipulation though.
"given the same amount of time" That's the kicker here. Given the same amount of time, a plant left alone will yield better because as you said it doesn't have to take the time to recover from the damage done to it. However, not everyone can run a sea of green and just let a bunch of plants fill their space perfectly due to plant count constraints and such, so a lot of people top, LST, supercrop, etc, in order to fill their space more completely resulting in much higher yields then if the plant was left alone.
Another consideration is if you have two rooms one for veg and one for flower the flower room is ocupied for 8-10 weeks. This gives you extra time to shape your plants. Why not use that time to your advantage.
Topping pretty much gives you two main branches instead of just one.. This increases your branches and gives you more colas of bud.. The bad thing with topping is the delay in growth and also the size of your buds will be smaller because instead of focusing on fewer colas the plant has to focus on a lot of colas.. Fimming is about the same thing, but is harder to do and gives you 4 branches instead of just one.. Lst and scrog are highly recommended in order to increase yields because instead of having one cola by the main light source you can have all the colas at equal distance away giving you more bud.. Hope I helped ya a bit.. Later
dunno what you guys are talking about I topped a plant and didn't top a plant from the same batch and one finished at 124g and the other 70g both indoors 2month veg 1 month flower... guess which was the 124, yeah the topped one... if you don't top the plant there is only one main cola(the biggest nug on your plant) and when you top every time you do it you double your main colas (you can also top other sites so long as they show fully matured leaves) sure your plant has more bud sites to send nutrients to so... give it more nutrients!!! give it more light!! give it more love!! also my my massive child barely got to be 3 feet tall
also make sure to send enough light around the sides of the plant (I actually have lights under the plants facing up)
I top my plants because by topping my plants I am able to get 35-45% more yield in the same time, and my plants are shorter and easier to deal with. I could increase the yield more by LST or Scrog, but topping is so much faster. If you cut above the 2nd node you don't get 2 colas, you actually get 4. Here is a fantastic post about 4-cola topping (It's on RIU so hopefully it's kosher that I post a link.) Uncle Ben's Topping Technique to get 2 or 4 MAIN colas