tie it down?

I was wondering if it would damage my plant if I tie the branches down and keep topping it. As of right now it has four tops that have been topped again. It's just a small experament I'm trying. But still, I've heard you cab train the plants. Id love to try but I want to make sure it won't hurt the plant. My goal is to make as many tops as I can before I sent it into flowering, but I want it to be bushy as well. Some of the bigger branches are blocking light from the smaller ones in the center and id like to tie them down so they will grow outward and then back up, prefferably around the smaller branches in the middle. Will that work?

you'll be fine tieing down just be carefull not to snap it.. if i can make a suggestion, looks like u could use alot more lights.. what lights are using now?

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Originally Posted by prettygirlsmokes420

I was wondering if it would damage my plant if I tie the branches down and keep topping it. As of right now it has four tops that have been topped again. It's just a small experament I'm trying. But still, I've heard you cab train the plants. Id love to try but I want to make sure it won't hurt the plant. My goal is to make as many tops as I can before I sent it into flowering, but I want it to be bushy as well. Some of the bigger branches are blocking light from the smaller ones in the center and id like to tie them down so they will grow outward and then back up, prefferably around the smaller branches in the middle. Will that work?

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You have no doubt seen that it is hard to kill off this weed if you are giving it what it needs, and topping (I prefer FIM'ing) or LST (low stress training) just seems to encourage the dang things. A master grower once told me that when you force the tallest growth to be lower than some of the other growth on the sides, it releases a hormone into the plant that tells it to grow out from the sides. Tying down your top growth does produce a much more bushy plant because of this.

Do a search here on the board for LST and for FIM. FIM has an added advantage that topping does not give... Four tops result instead of the two that you get with topping a branch. I use this method to great effect before I bring my plants to the flowering tent where they go under a SCRog screen, where of course I want to have as many bud sites as I can manage to produce. Good luck with your grow, and do some reading on these advanced techniques. Look at my grow log where I learned to do these things some time ago and shared the results with the good folks here. There are many examples on the forum of all these techniques, and you never know how effective they are until you try them yourself.

Thanks I've been thinking, and I want to transplant to a bigger pot before I tie them down. The roots are starting to gather at the bottom.of the container so I want a bigger one. Then for now I think ill tie down the tallest ones first and so on....

Hello Pretty! Great idea, we are doing something like what you are, outside, again this year. Some of our growers who have been around showed me a garden where all the girls were planted at about a 45 degree angle, bending them untill the main stem is horizontal. They also trellise them to wires like a grape vine, and spreading the growth out on the trellise, orienting the line so that the sun gets both sides. All the new growth goes straight up, all are growing at nearly the same height , bud growth is more nearly equal, and inspection, cropping, training and harvest is much easier. While no pics were available for last year, I will show this variation of technique this season. Like FIM ing this method makes for many more branching sites, since the height of the branches are more equal FIM ing each top works well, and those tops are much more uniform in size. Some growers were even able to put two girls in one hole with no one the wiser and got about 150+% yield from the 2 in 1 plan. Mmmm. Probably should just search, but has anyone tried grafting and indica on to a sativa root stock? I think it should make a very good guerilla plant, big root ball, smaller plant, could do well all by itself out there somewhere.... Oh no that wouldn't be right now would it, probably illegal or just wrong...