Top plant with tight internodal spacing?

Wondering if I should still top a plant with incredibly tight inner notal spacing. I always have and I grow using SCROG.

Kind of wondering if I should not cause the stress of topping and use bending to promote side branching instead.

Supercrop it. Or just pluck off the very top. Or better just leave it if you have the height.

MyFridendWasWondering said:

Wondering if I should still top a plant with incredibly tight inner notal spacing. I always have and I grow using SCROG.

Kind of wondering if I should not cause the stress of topping and use bending to promote side branching instead.

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Those kind of plants aren't the best for a real Scrog grow. You want something that spreads it's wings for tying down to the screen to train horizontally.

Bending the whole plant over is an option too. Topping will force the side branches to grow out faster but I don't think it's particularly stressful to the plant as cannabis is well adapted to losing some parts due to predation, weather etc.

MyFridendWasWondering said:

Wondering if I should still top a plant with incredibly tight inner notal spacing. I always have and I grow using SCROG.

Kind of wondering if I should not cause the stress of topping and use bending to promote side branching instead.

Click to expand...

Why not?

Topping doesn't cause significant damage to the plant because all you're doing is removing a small amount of growth from the plant that has contributed almost nothing to the plant in terms of photosynthesis. Sure, there's a wound but the plant reacts to that immediately and that process is well on its way in a day or two.

That's the inverse when growers remove lower fan leaves in flower. Plants use the chemicals in fan leaves for growth and for loading up seeds with nutrients. Despite that, growers gleefully cut off those nutrient stores.

All in all, topping is a valid method of removing the apical stem to control plant shape.

"incredibly tight" - I top my plants and since I grow under separate veg and flower lights, when I go to top at day 21, it's difficult to get to the fourth node. The plant in the attachment is 21 days old, about 5" tall, and it was actually five nodes tall.

(Yeh, got a little nute burn. First time I've grown a photo and their Chemdogs that have been in the 'fridge for 18 months so I'm thinking that they're a little touchy about nutes)

Delps8 said:

Why not?

Topping doesn't cause significant damage to the plant because all you're doing is removing a small amount of growth from the plant that has contributed almost nothing to the plant in terms of photosynthesis. Sure, there's a wound but the plant reacts to that immediately and that process is well on its way in a day or two.

That's the inverse when growers remove lower fan leaves in flower. Plants use the chemicals in fan leaves for growth and for loading up seeds with nutrients. Despite that, growers gleefully cut off those nutrient stores.

All in all, topping is a valid method of removing the apical stem to control plant shape.

"incredibly tight" - I top my plants and since I grow under separate veg and flower lights, when I go to top at day 21, it's difficult to get to the fourth node. The plant in the attachment is 21 days old, about 5" tall, and it was actually five nodes tall.

(Yeh, got a little nute burn. First time I've grown a photo and their Chemdogs that have been in the 'fridge for 18 months so I'm thinking that they're a little touchy about nutes)


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That looks nice, what strain is that

Billytheluther said:

That looks nice, what strain is that

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It's a Nirvana Chemdog that I bought about 18 months ago. It's being vegged under a veg light (heavy blue). It's only my second grow with the veg light and, I thought I had an Mg issue, like I did in my previous grow, so I did a foliar spray of Epsom.

But that turned out to be wrong. Best I can figure out is that the blue light exaggerates color differences and what I saw as interveinal chlorosis was just the color variation in a young plant.

And that became very obvious when I took the plant out for the picture.

Live Grow and learn, eh?