LSTTT: Low Stress Twisty Tie Training

And the "after" 2nd tie down photos. The 3rd one is a close up of the biggest plant, which is the same plant as in the "before" close ups. A bunch of bud sites a coming. The last photo is a jerry-rigged light, of which I put one set on each side of the grow to supplement the 600W HPS. I thought it needed some blue. They are 23 W each and 5500K daylight bulbs, for a total of 400W equivalent additional. Should help. I know tinfoil sucks, but it's better than letting the bulbs stick out past the reflector, and I wasn't going to spend any more money on this grow.

As you can see I experimented with taping down branches with foil duct tape, but I have my doubts as to how well the tape will stick once it heats up in there tomorrow morning.

And does anybody know what in the world those cloud-like ghosty things are in some of my photos? I see them in some other peoples' photos too.

Well in my opinoin the anwser is obvious. Your plants are haunted, as are theirs.

i use "sturdy-twists" its the same as twist ties but comes in a 50 meter roll and only costs a couple bucks. its great for LST since you can make the ties any length and are easy to put on and remove. check my grow log to see what i mean.

those ghostly orbs are most likely dust refracting light during the camera flash or cfls, guess i been watching to much ghost hunters to know that lol.

Aww. you ruined my theory of past plants spirits protecting new plants.
Thats great lookin opie. Is that a bunch of seedlings on the side?
Also opie, Your gonna use a stadium scrog? I used that my first real grow. This time I tried flat and I can say, I see a huge difference(for the better).

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Originally Posted by Zcomp

Aww. you ruined my theory of past plants spirits protecting new plants.
Thats great lookin opie. Is that a bunch of seedlings on the side?
Also opie, Your gonna use a stadium scrog? I used that my first real grow. This time I tried flat and I can say, I see a huge difference(for the better).

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Yeah, I was hoping they were some friendly ghosts too. Yeah, going to use a stadium, since the shape of the HPS light intensity is in a ball. I've found that with a flat screen and HID lighting, the ones in the middle grow much faster, and I end up with a Christmas tree shaped grow, with the tip of the tree pointing at the light. Also with a stadium screen you get a little more surface area. (?15% more?) Why do you like a flat one better? What is the huge difference? Oh wait, if I remember correctly you are using a homemade reflector with several CFLs. I'm not sure, but I'm betting a flat screen might be better for this.

id naturally assume that past plant spirits would be upset at not having experienced pollination and having been axe-murdered by you....

Your right on that one opie. I have that huge CFL setup(though I just added some HPS). ahh thats right, the reason I stopped stadium was because the middle buds(being at the lowest elevation) would not grow large even though they were the closest to the light. Now I've done a sorta flat LST job(no screen at all). I found it too hard to keep repositioning the screen(all that bud shaking).
And I've noticed marked improvement(exact #'s coming soon) in over all bud size variation. I noticed that even though some buds were farther from the source, they grew larger in-spite of closer-but-lower buds.

All this talk of Scrog makes me want to do a Scrog on my next grow.

I'm telling you Gundari, SCROG is the way to go. Everybody should at least experiment with it once or twice to see if they can adapt it to their growing methods, and dare I say, maybe even consider rearrange their growing style to accommodate a couple screens.

Well I think I'm really digging this LST thing. I've done LST mixed with topping before, but this is my first LST only grow. Now don't hold me to this. I'm not saying that I absolutely will not do a little chopping at some point. I am not completely sure at this point, but I'm thinking that LST gets results a little faster and better than topping. It seems like as long as I keep the top of the main stem down below the others, big healthy nodes keep popping up all over the place. I recently counted at least 32 nice usable nodes on the biggest plant, and a bunch of others that will probably end up getting pinched off in the near future. Every day I have been bending fan leaves out of the way and tyeing stuff down as needed. This takes more time by far than topping, but I think it might be worth it. Still forming opinions.

I would be very appreciative of any ideas or suggestions people may have. I have never grown quite like this before. Last night while laying in bed, it struck me that I may have screwed up already. I am laying everything flat from the beginning, and getting nodes randomly popping up all over the place. The way things are going, it's going to be a jungle of stems in there. The fan leaves and branches will be trimmed off of the first 8 inches or so, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get my hands all the way to the back of the grow. I'm thinking that perhaps I should have let the plants grow vertically about 8 inches before tyeing the branches down, then I would have 9 stems to deal with instead of 100. I think I will continue to grow like this until everything is filled in nicely, then train the plants to grow up in rows of stems. Maybe I'll have 4 or 5 slots that allow me to reach all the way to the back.

Anyone? Buhler? Did I already screw myself over? Should I start the plants going vertically immediately? Should I toss that one in the lower left that isn't growing very well? And why are those sheep up in the trees?

Huh what? Oh wait a minute I just had a thought. I'm slowly seeing 2 screens merging into my grow somehow. Who brought that up? Image Reaper? Pharmacan? Sorry if props aint proper, little stoney in here at the moment. Can somebody please draw me a picture of how this can work?