Uncle Ben's Topping Technique to Get 2 or 4 Main Colas

What is your opinion on MG?? I've used alot of consumer salts, and MG always seems to start off !great! (at a fraction of a dosage), but seems to throw things out of proportion as time goes on, and locks out micros.. (And I had decent pH, and wasn't applying them anywhere near full strength).. Peter's, Plant-Prod, and Shultz's were more managable..

born2killspam said:

What is your opinion on MG?? I've used alot of consumer salts, and MG always seems to start off !great! (at a fraction of a dosage), but seems to throw things out of proportion as time goes on, and locks out micros.. (And I had decent pH, and wasn't applying them anywhere near full strength).. Peter's, Plant-Prod, and Shultz's were more managable..

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I have read comments in orchid forums that MG has stuff in it that will eventually coat the sides of a clay pot, seen it myself but only with alot of use which may be true with any food. If you kick up the organics like the meals, compost, alfalfa meal.....you can almost get by with NO foods, only minor tweaks.

Here's a great guide to Scott's, who took over most of the Peters products. http://www.scottspro.com/products/fertilizers/peters_pro.cfm

Yea I like my compost/organics.. I'm not an organic nazi though.. I have no problem having salts in there so long as they're compatible, but I like the organics to complete the balanced diet with the plethora of compounds..
IMO salts are like Cheerios.. "Part of a balanced breakfast"..

Thanks for that link btw.. Hunting down that data is often tougher than it should be..

Hey UB,
Just thought I should stop by and post my first experience with topping after reading your thread. This is my first indoor grow and even though you explained topping well, I didn't completely understand EXACTLY how its done so I just went ahead and tried out different things like you suggested.

I cut my plants at various nodes to see how the plant responded. Keep in mind, all of my plants had 5-6 nodes and some with the 7th barely forming. I have one bagseed that I FIM'ed at the incoming 4th node and topped at the sixth node after the new growth. And now, I have between 6+ tops on that plant. All of my Sativas I topped above the second node. I cut above the second node once on one of my indicas but it hurt me to see how much I was cutting off. After that, I cut above the third node (my fav) which seems to have given me 6 new tops? Then I cute above the fourth node and it gave me two new tops plus making the plant more bushy. All the cuts seem to be beneficial but I would have to say I like cutting above the third node the best. We see what the end results turn out like. Hopefully the ones I cute are females...

The rest of my plants I experimented with different FIM cuts to see if I could pin point where the cut is supposed to be. A lot of weird but good things happened with the FIM which I'm not going to mention cause this is a topping thread. Anyhow, here are some pics.

PS. I tried cutting at different parts on the stem inbetween nodes to see if it affects the response. I couldn't quite notice anything but I don't think I epxerimented with enough plants. Do you think it makes a difference? I also noticed the stems creating knots at the new main branches... what is that?

+rep for concise experimentation merahoon.. Can you outline your strains/breeders (or are they all bagseed)? Some strains/phenos top/fim ALOT better than others, it would be sweet to get some kind of record going since alot of true-breeding strains produce nearly identical offspring these days..

Thank you very much. I have ten indicas which are called Sandstorm from Cannabiogen. They are 100% indica, mother is from the Chitral Kush region and father was from Arabene, Morroco. The one plant with 6+ tops is a bagseed I found on my floor while I was about to start my other seedlings!! How ironic lol. I have 3 Power Skunk that I got with the 10 Sandstorm. Attitude was giving away 5 free power skunk seeds and 3 of them sprouted. I don't know if you saw the four lil guys, but those are white rhino bagseed. They JUST entered the vegetative phase.. i think. I hope I answered your question. If not, let me know

Good enough for now until results are obvious, then it would be nice to know what is what in the pics..

Edit: I love it when ppl pay attention to the lineage of their strains.. I'm always looking for info on the family trees of recent crosses.. I prefer to boil them down to the original breeding stock crosses if possible.. Some breeders just bastardize things.. There are some WW for sale out there that don't trace back to Indian/Brasilian at all, yet the unscruplulous breeder labels it WW because it got him really baked..

Yeah I agree. I personally like to try all the new crosses and what not just to try different flavors and to get different highs or mixed highs. I don't like how peolpe just put a name on something like you said. Thats just stupid. If a strain is made, it should show its lineage and be called something similar to what it came from. UB I'm not highjacking your thread just going to add something funny to it. This link is to Katt Williams sketch on weed. In his sketch he talks about people random names on their weed. Take seven minutes of your time to watch it if you haven't seen it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93jQI_6G5Cw

born2killspam said:

Yea I like my compost/organics.. I'm not an organic nazi though.. I have no problem having salts in there so long as they're compatible, but I like the organics to complete the balanced diet with the plethora of compounds..
IMO salts are like Cheerios.. "Part of a balanced breakfast"..

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Ditto, I am not an organic purist. Those type of cultists are really disappointed when I tell them I believe in organics, but I am also willing to find a balance with a shot of malathion or Peters if it insures my success.

"They" don't like to hear that.

merahoon said:

Yeah I agree. I personally like to try all the new crosses and what not just to try different flavors and to get different highs or mixed highs. I don't like how peolpe just put a name on something like you said. Thats just stupid. If a strain is made, it should show its lineage and be called something similar to what it came from. UB I'm not highjacking your thread just going to add something funny to it. This link is to Katt Williams sketch on weed. In his sketch he talks about people random names on their weed. Take seven minutes of your time to watch it if you haven't seen it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93jQI_6G5Cw

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Thanks for the link! Funny stuff!

I guffaw every time I hear of a "new strain". Someone mentions "madonna", lifesaver, deepchunk, super this and super that and I just shake my head.

Uncle Ben said:

Ditto, I am not an organic purist. Those type of cultists are really disappointed when I tell them I believe in organics, but I am also willing to find a balance with a shot of malathion or Peters if it insures my success.

"They" don't like to hear that.

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Alot of ppl are blind to the fact that organics contain/produce the same scary sounding chemicals we're adding in measured proportions.. (Actually organics can contain some REALLY scary trace compounds, but its all good ) Too many ppl think that plants suck complex organic molecules/matter all the way up to the apex.. A common example is how ppl expect supplimenting with molasses/fruit, will make the bud carry those characteristic flavours.. They fail to realize that they merely improved their soil ecosystem to make available more of those scary chemicals at a time when the plant can really use them, and happy plants produce the sweetest buds..
Pure organics buffer mistakes really well, so you really gotta screw up bad to go downhill fast.. Being able to manage salts is a sign of soil/need understanding..

born2killspam said:

Alot of ppl are blind to the fact that organics contain/produce the same scary sounding chemicals we're adding in measured proportions.. (Actually organics can contain some REALLY scary trace compounds, but its all good )

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Yep. Can't have uptake without chemicals, salts. I have been banned from cannabis sites run by organic zealots because I would state the same thing. Twas Blasphemy it twas. Even had a thread closed down one time because I recommended malathion for insect control. Site was The Tropical Cabana. There are some pretty wacked out cannabis forums out there.

Too many ppl think that plants suck complex organic molecules/matter all the way up to the apex.. A common example is how ppl expect supplimenting with molasses/fruit, will make the bud carry those characteristic flavours.. They fail to realize that they merely improved their soil ecosystem to make available more of those scary chemicals at a time when the plant can really use them, and happy plants produce the sweetest buds..

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Yep. It is my understanding that those type molecules are too big to transfer across the root epidermal gradient anyway. It's all about selling snake oils and rocket fuels to "those that want to believe". I have used molasses under several conditions and seen no improvement. Want to get a real grasp of soil science which includes non-conventional soil additives? Call up Dr. Mark McFarland at Texas a&M. He'll set the record straight. Like he said one time in a seminar I attended, "wanna know what happens to those microbes you pour out of the bottle once they hit the ground? The natives just eat them suckas." Check this out hombre. It's a real eye opener: https://www.planetganja.com/highsociety/showthread.php?p=1106116#post1106116

Pure organics buffer mistakes really well, so you really gotta screw up bad to go downhill fast.. Being able to manage salts is a sign of soil/need understanding..

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Yep

If you saw no benefit from adding molasses then your soil must be pretty carb loaded naturally already.. What all do you compost? Are you selective, or gung-ho??
Molasses/carb-loading is about feeding the soil microbes (yeasts, bacteria, mychorrizae, et al).. It energizes them to work for the plant, it doesn't do much for the plant directly at all..
There is a symbiotic relationship that has formed over the ages.. Plants will actually dump carbs they produce into the soil (presumably because they benefit from microbe activity they facilitate).. But in most annuals their reserves apparently tend to deplete around early fall.. Perhaps thats why many on these forums have adopted to starting molasses in the later stages only.. But regardless, nature is cool..
Another snake-oil I cling to is that fermenting boost buckets are more effective than at first glance because of the ethane, and other organic compounds they evolve with the CO2.. I swear the side of my table nearest the boost bucket finished a bit earlier each and every time regardless where I put it..
(Don't get me wrong, I'm not just fermenting for the gases.. I'm as much into brewing/distilling as I am growing..)
You won't benefit from carb-loading a hydroponic grow though unless you're feeding/supplimenting with fish & bacteria.. Not many ppl do that though.. I played around with it in university.. I had a drip table with one chemical res (DNF nutes), and one res with goldfish and a bacteria product designed to accelerate waste breakdown.. Twas fun, worked nicely.. But goldfish probably have a bounty on my head for the near genocide..
And a while back I read that one (actually quite complex) carb was discovered to travel upwards directly, but thats the exception that proves the rule.. I can't remember now though dangit.. Gonna have to relook it up..

Yep. Can't have uptake without chemicals, salts. I have been banned from cannabis sites run by organic zealots because I would state the same thing. Twas Blasphemy it twas. Even had a thread closed down one time because I recommended malathion for insect control. Site was The Tropical Cabana. There are some pretty wacked out cannabis forums out there.

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Thats like banning Feynman from a physics forum.. I read pretty much everything you wrote at overgrow.. I never posted there though, my policy is if I'm actively growing I don't discuss it.. And I was going through school on a green scholarship at the time.. Now there are kids at that 'no can do' age in the house..

born2killspam said:

If you saw no benefit from adding molasses then your soil must be pretty carb loaded naturally already.. What all do you compost? Are you selective, or gung-ho??

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I'm not currently composting for indoor mixes but in the past have used mostly leaves, grass clippings, kitchen scraps and manure if I can get it for the N. If not, then I add some ammonium sulfate to the pile. I do have a large pile of horse manure with bedding (stable) material (shredded wood from a lumber mill). That goes into outdoor plantings though as I don't turn it. It would require using my front end loader on my tractor and I'm just too lazy plus we can't seem to get a calm day around here. I just planted a couple of very high quality olive trees and before they went in I dumped 2 bucket loads of horse manure over the general location and then fractured the soil to a depth of about 24" with a chisel on a tractor 3 point which worked some of it in down deep. My cuz then tilled the area to a fine brown texture with a big ass tiller. Is that treatment gonna grow some trees or what?! If you use peat moss and a little compost in your potting mix, that's all you need other than a few NPK tweaks.

I've been wanting to play with mychorrizae, just haven't got around to it. I'll use a control group to see what happens.

Molasses/carb-loading is about feeding the soil microbes (yeasts, bacteria, mychorrizae, et al).. It energizes them to work for the plant, it doesn't do much for the plant directly at all..
There is a symbiotic relationship that has formed over the ages.. Plants will actually dump carbs they produce into the soil (presumably because they benefit from microbe activity they facilitate).. But in most annuals their reserves apparently tend to deplete around early fall.. Perhaps thats why many on these forums have adopted to starting molasses in the later stages only.. But regardless, nature is cool..
Another snake-oil I cling to is that fermenting boost buckets are more effective than at first glance because of the ethane, and other organic compounds they evolve with the CO2.. I swear the side of my table nearest the boost bucket finished a bit earlier each and every time regardless where I put it..
(Don't get me wrong, I'm not just fermenting for the gases.. I'm as much into brewing/distilling as I am growing..)

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Hey, can't beat dem side products.

You won't benefit from carb-loading a hydroponic grow though unless you're feeding/supplimenting with fish & bacteria.. Not many ppl do that though.. I played around with it in university.. I had a drip table with one chemical res (DNF nutes), and one res with goldfish and a bacteria product designed to accelerate waste breakdown.. Twas fun, worked nicely.. But goldfish probably have a bounty on my head for the near genocide..

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Sounds about as bad as me putting my worm farm in a small bathroom where I was brewing beer. I asphixated those poor creatures.

And a while back I read that one (actually quite complex) carb was discovered to travel upwards directly, but thats the exception that proves the rule.. I can't remember now though dangit.. Gonna have to relook it up..

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I'd like to see some studies on that. It is my opinion that carbo molecules are too large to move thru the root's epidermal gradient, either way.

Thats like banning Feynman from a physics forum.. I read pretty much everything you wrote at overgrow.. I never posted there though, my policy is if I'm actively growing I don't discuss it.. And I was going through school on a green scholarship at the time.. Now there are kids at that 'no can do' age in the house..

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Very cool! Glad to have you around,
Tio

Carb-loading will only help if your soil is deficient.. If its not, then adding more is kind of like eating dessert after Thanksgiving dinner..
If you've got a strong mychorrizae colony, then carbs are even more important.. Mychorrizae are a special group of fungus to certain plants.. They literally grow into the root, and their colony adds a tons of surface area equivalency..
So with a strong colony, a good portion of your root system is actually fungus, and its going to want carbs to eat and stay strong..
Non-mychorrizial microbes merely break stuff down, so as long as that job gets done, all is good, but if the fungi that have taken residence in the roots are joined at the hip with the plants, so you gotta keep them strong, or lose alot of root vigour..
I saw one experiment where they grew corn in specific mychorrizia rich soil, and others in control soils that were pretreated with a specific antifungal.. When they reached a certain point the mychorrrzials were stronger.. They added the specific anti-fungal to both group's soils at this point.. The corn grown in control soil kept growing pretty normally, but the mychorrzia grown samples took a serious punch to the teeth..
There is one tricky thing about mychorrizae though.. And that is they are somewhat plant type specific.. Some are mychorrzial with some plants, others with others.. Amanita Muscaria mushrooms are mychorrzial with alot of hardwoods for instance, but not with cannabis..
Kind of a reason I've never dropped big bucks on mychorrzial labelled soil, but I break those sterility rules and mix in some ultra loamy surface soil from forest lowlands with softer green plants .. That was what my dad had us collect each year when we prepped our garden, and our garden was always a talking point in the community.. I've never done big soil grows though.. When I was growing seriously I was doing hydro.. After university I did soil-grown personal crops, never had more than 2-3 at a time though, so concise experimention didn't happen.. My dad is no fool though.. He may be a lumberjack who uses words like 'fer', but he REALLY knows the forest so I'm giving benefit of doubt for now..
And for the record, I've never had a bug problem..

Hard to believe your worms couldn't handle that.. Not so hard to believe that 427 goldfish couldn't hack pH 5.4 with more NH3 than the norm for too long..

I'm trying to think of a unique word/phrase that was in that carb uptake info.. Without that finding that again will be tough..

It is my understanding that there are 2 types of mycors, each tends to mine the soil differently regarding plant type. There is only one way to find out and that's to do a control group and keep careful records. Even then so many factors come into play with this stuff. What one person says caused the whatever could have actually been due to a change in temps and such.

Speaking of factors, that's why I have to laugh when someone says "he got 2 grams/lumen." Doesn't mean a damn thing, as no two light systems are the same, no two spectrums are the same, etc. and all cultural factors have been discarded in favor of some ridiculous measurement, anecdotal at that which can not be verified or confirmed.

born2killspam said:

Another snake-oil I cling to is that fermenting boost buckets are more effective than at first glance because of the ethane, and other organic compounds they evolve with the CO2.. I swear the side of my table nearest the boost bucket finished a bit earlier each and every time regardless where I put it..
(Don't get me wrong, I'm not just fermenting for the gases.. I'm as much into brewing/distilling as I am growing..)

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What is this bucket your talking about and the benefits of it? I looked up "fermenting boost buckets" but I just pulled of things of how to brew...

I'm well versed in physics, and I've been running around trying to smash lighting myths for a long time.. Regarding plants especially, virtually all ways ppl in this hobby discuss lighting is absolutely incorrect.. Luckily its fairly equivalently incorrect, and aside from slightly differing spectrums from differing gas mixtures and ballast specs the combination of misdescription and misunderstanding cancel each other out, leaving comparable info..
The brutal crime is when lumen outputs of MH are compared to lumen outputs of HPS.. The spectrums differ so much, that lumens cannot be used as a comparison for photosynthetically active radiation at all..
Actually, even watt by watt those two can't be compared, because HPS throws out roughly 1.5x as many photosynthetically active photons/watt as MH, and acceptable photon counts (measured in µEinsteins) are what plants really care about.. I've been meaning to work out a respectable greenplant-lumen system, but ppl would actually need the true bulb spectrum, not those continuous curves they put on boxes to integrate their plant-lumen value..
I agree totally about subtleties being able to overtake predictability.. Soil organisms have some serious cycles I know for one thing.. My strategy is to get some soil from oddly lush areas filled with plants similar to what I'm planting.. Mychorrizial fungii are not rare in nature.. The dream is to stumble upon a cheap system/mix that works 10x better than any other (whatever makes it do so).. The way I see it, is guys like you, who have been around the block for so long have your systems that work, and its as good a starting point as any for newer ppl to develop their own lucky concoction.. Anecdote is better than nothing when total understanding isn't feasible..

I love online course material for partial understanding though!
http://www.soils.wisc.edu/~hickey/Soils_523/PartII/

merahoon, a byproduct of brewing/fermenting is constant CO2 production.. Roughly 50% of the sugar mass is released as CO2 over the fermenting period..
Another route though if you don't want the alcohol is to allow yeast to process the sugar in an aerobic environment.. In this mode, they reproduce rather than ferment, and the chemistry is different allowing you to yield roughly 1.5x the sugar mass in CO2..
And as I mentioned quite a few other gases are also evolved in small quantities..