Topped, Please clarify for a newbie

I think I get the basic concept. You take off the top of the main stalk and usually two grow in it's place. But tell me more about it. When do you do it? How much do you take off? Is it a good idea to take off enough for a clone? And what about yeild? I've read that when multiple branchs bloom it doesn't mean you get more bud you just get 2 buds half the size. I'm also wondering if the secondary branches that are coming out will form little buds alongside the big one(making one big fat bud), or if they just suck from the main bud and form little ones? Height really isn't an issue for me persay with about 6ft floor to ceiling, I just want to know a little more about this.

hmm well a lot of your questions can be answered by searching on the net or by searching these forums, but i will answer what i know off the top of my head.

you can top a plant whenever you want, it all depends when you want the plant to start bushing out, basically. when a plant is young, it will generally just grow upwards with no sideways branching for quite awhile, so if you want to start branching earlier, you can top it sooner.

you can take off as much as you want; you can either just pinch off the very top of the growth tip, or you can cut off down as many nodes as you want...doesn't really matter. i think where you top it (like if it's done at the 6th node or the 10th node) affects how many sidebranches will form, but im not sure. it is a GREAT idea to use the cut off part of the plant to use as a clone. it would be a waste just throwing it out.

i think your point about yield is currently debated among growers. i think the benefit of topping when it comes to yield would be from getting the growth tips more light=bigger buds.

hope that helps a bit- but the more you research about this the more you will find out. these boards are invaluable.

I love topping my plants....I do it on all of them. While there are strains that do not respond very well to topping most of the ones I have seen do great with it.....I'm sure there are others that know better which strains don't top well. As for when to do it....it must be done before flowering and I usually leave a week (in hydro) for the growth to regenerate before I put them in 12/12 ...if you don't let the budsites grow back they won't be growing you any buds. I try to wait until the top node has about 1/2 inch stem then snip it right in the middle...too close to the bottom and you may clip off some future needed foliage. i'm sure there a folks here that have photos or diagrams posted on how to do it....I personally found that topping my plants increased the yield by a huge amount (using a strain that likes topping of course) KP mentioned on another thread "topping the tops" and that is basically what I do....makes for longer tiime in veg but happy days in flower:)

Both of the answers above are excellent but I personally tend to lean in Weedhounds direction and only take the very top growth tip...I just hate to clip off too much of what I have lovingly watched grow! But like Dutch said, if you top off a few nodes you have a wonderful clone prospect.

Pruning is the action of manipulating the number of node regions (potential bud sites) that your plant creates and has nothing to do with the thinning process. Cutting a plant at the stem will automatically result in Hopping'. For this reason, plants that are thinned via cutting will end up growing more than one top cola.

Indica plants tend to be smaller than Sativas. If you learn to prune your plant properly you can produce small bushy Sativa plants that grow in tiny spaces. Without pruning, a Sativa plant can stretch to five feet or more.

Keep in mind that there is a limit to how much you can prune a marijuana plant. If you prune the stem, it will split in two. You can prune both of these new stems and end up with four stems. You can try to prune each of these four stems to create eight stems, but results will depend on the strain and its genetically predetermined branching limit. You might be able to prune some of the lateral branches, but again, if the plant has reached its threshold it will not produce more branches. All strains are different in this respect.

Keep in mind that there is a limit to how much you can prune a marijuana plant. If you prune the stem, it will split in two. You can prune both of these new stems and end up with four stems. You can try to prune each of these four stems to create eight stems, but results will depend on the strain and its genetically predetermined branching limit. You might be able to prune some of the lateral branches, but again, if the plant has reached its threshold it will not produce more branches. All strains are different in this respect.

Depending on the strain and the growing environment, the 'topped' plant may produce two small top colas instead of two big ones. Also, each strain has a threshold for bud production that cannot be improved upon because it is a genetically predetermined factor. On the other hand, some plants when fully grown without topping do not reach their threshold. The strain Blueberry is a good example of this. If you grow Blueberry without topping you won't achieve maximum bud production from that plant, but if you top the Blueberry, you will. Other strains aren't so flexible and the two top colas will simply share the same volume of bud that a single cola would have produced on the same strain.

Plants are generally pruned three to four weeks into their vegetative cycle, but can be pruned sooner or later or more than once.

Pruning during flowering is not advised as the plant will be forced to divert its energy from bud production into branch and leaf production. This results in a slower rate of bud growth. For optimal growth finish your pruning well before flowering.

KP YOU GO GIRL!!!:D

:p
thanx babe!

There is a topping method known as the FIM technique. If you push the leaves apart at the very top of the plant you should see a small bud (not flowering bud but an actually leaf bud). Use a pair of nail clippers to pinch off about 3/4 of the bud. This should result in more than two top colas being developed. In a single FIM clipping you can produce up to eight new top colas.
The origins of this technique are humorous. As the story goes, FIM was discovered accidentally when a grower messed up a topping exercise. FIM stands for: "Fuck I Missed".

Another method of topping is called Super Cropping. By taking a branch between your forefinger and thumb you can gently crush the branch, causing it to develop multiple branches above the crushed area. You must crush it on the correct side or risk breaking the branch. Just squeeze lightly until you feel the branch give, then let go. If it gives easily then you have crushed it on the correct side. If it is hard to crush and the branch splits then you have chosen the wrong side. Practice makes perfect with Super Cropping.

Super Cropping should be carried out during the second or third week of vegetative growth and does stunt the plant. You should also note that plants that are Super Cropped can remain in the vegetative growth stage for twice as long as normal but the end result is a very bushy plant with multiple node regions that should all produce bud. Many growers have thrown Super Cropped plants away because they believed that the plants were not flowering in time. If you Super Crop your plants make sure that you have the patience to wait until the process is finished which is usually about four to six more weeks of vegetative growth.

KP I think I love you.
while all of you were replying I was searching the forum and found a world of info about this amazing topping techniqueand my eyes have been opened. Tommorrow is I'm flushing, increasing the P in my nute solution(figured out I had a deficiency today) and it looks like we will be topping and cloning. I'm so excited:D

glad to help sweetie:)

kp:p

While I have your attention KP I have another question for you....

I need to flush tommorror and I've never done it and I'm a little nervous because in the past I've had a tendency to over water and problems with root rot, so I like to be careful now. The soil is a little damp today and should be dry by tommorrrow, is this a good time to do it? And how do I know when I've flushed enough. And is there any instruction for how to follow up with nutes? I'm a spong for info so I'll take any you have honey.

set your plant in the bathtub and run lukewarm water (easy, now) to flush. just keep watering until the drainage is crystal clear. then, to add nutes, go with 1/4 strength, alow soil to dry out, nute with 1/4 strength again and go back to your schedule.

i'll be here for a few, so if you need anything else...;)

kp:p

Hey, I'm not KP but I will try to answer your questions. To flush, it doesn't really matter when you do it, just make sure you allow your pots to dry out completely before watering again in the future. And when you flush, to do it completely, flush with about 3x the amount of water your pot holds. ie. 3 gallon pot=flush with 9gallons of water. After you flush, i would follow up with lighter than full strength nutes.

oops KP answered anyways. lol. the bathtub idea is a really good one actually, that's what i use when i have severe salt/nute buildup in my soil. it clears everything out.

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When do you do it? How much do you take off? Is it a good idea to take off enough for a clone? And what about yeild?

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do it between 4th and 5th node if possible, just cut off the little leaf bud right at the top, the only way you could 'clone' a topped head would be if you use tissue culture, which is a pretty advanced way of rooting small cutting, from what i can gather.. yeild it can affect, but if you give it enough time to grow back enough you should be fine...

just my two cents...

Ask and ye shall receive....:)

can someone post a pic of them topping their plant or something cause that would help a bit more for us noobs lol

i'll post several examples tonite, prob around midnite... i gotta cut clones, so i can give you 50-60 examples if you want,lol :D

;) KP to the rescue!!

I FIMmed today(just a little proud of myself) hope I did it right, I'm trying to take a few clones too, with KP's help of course.

Cloning is a simple method of replicating your plants. In most cases a clone is taken from a mother plant and grown into a new plant that contains the exact same genetic code as its mother plant.
In a selection of 30 seeds you may find a nice mother plant that you wish to keep. You can sustain and keep using her genetic profile indefinitely through cloning.

Any cannabis plant can be cloned once it's been grown to a certain height and has developed a number of node regions.* The best place to take a cutting for cloning is above a node that has at least two nodes above it. The smallest cuttings on average are three inches in length. Once the cutting has been taken it is placed in the growing medium and should form new roots over the next one to three weeks.

Cloning straight to soil can have a low success rate and is very dependent on the type pf soil that you are using. Use the wrong soil and the clone will fail quickly. The best soil for cloning is a standard loam type with an even N PK ratio. Avoid using seedling or cutting soils as most of these have added hormones and nutrients that are not suitable for cannabis or cannabis cuttings.
Cloning in water also has a low success rate because the roots need air to breath once they have developed. If they remain submerged, the cuttings will eventually die. In water cloning, the cutting needs to be transferred to another medium, such as soil, rockwool or a hydroponics system. This means that the clone will have to move through a number of mediums before finally being transplanted to the main growing environment. Multiple transplants can lead to stress and the overall success rate can decrease because of this.

Some advanced growers like to use an aero cloning kit that acts like a miniature aeroponics systems for the propagation of clones.These systems can be expensive, however, and tend to require a lot of practice before getting cuttings to successfully root in the system.

The best medium for cloning is rockwool cubes or Oasis foam bricks. In order to increase your success rate with cloning you may wish to purchase a rooting solution, which can be bought from most grow shops.

Make sure you that use a clean instrument, or better yet a sterile instrument, when you make your cut. Try to take a piece of stem of no more than three inches between the cut zone and the next node level. The longer this section is, the more difficulty the cutting will have in the uptake of water and nutrients it needs to grow and produce roots. Take the cutting and dip the cut area into the rooting solution before placing it into the medium. Make sure that you close any holes where the cutting may have punctured the medium to prevent air from reaching the cut zone, which can stunt root growth. Do this by simply filling in any gaps with little pieces of the medium. Clones don't need much light to root. Try to avoid using the bigger grow bulbs for cloning as this can be a waste of electricity and bulb life. A simple window with some outdoor light is all you will need for the clone to root. Many people use fluorescent lights for clones.

When the clone takes root in the rockwool you will see the roots jut out from the sides of the cube. It is best to keep the cube size small so that you can observe the roots' progress. A two-inch squared cube is ideal for rooting cuttings. Any bigger and it will take longer for the roots to grow outside of the cube. When they do the clone should be transferred to its new grow medium: soil, hydroponics or aeroponics. This is the most successful way of producing clones. The great thing about cloning is that you can create hundreds of female plants from a single mother. Clones also flower more quickly and you know what you are getting in the end because you have already seen, smoked and grown the plant that the clone was taken from.

Although you can take clones at any time during the plant's life it is best to do so during the vegetative stage of growth. Clones carry the same age as the parent plant. Some clones used by seed-bank breeders are actually more than a decade old. They have been propagated for years and years by constantly taking cuttings from clones and then taking further cuttings from these cuttings. If you take a cutting a week before the plant is mature enough to display sex then the cutting should only need a week after rooting before it is able to flower. If you take a cutting during flowering the clone should be able to flower right away after it has rooted. If you want to revert a cutting from flowering to vegetative growth simply keep the cutting under 24 hours of light and clip away any calyx or flower formations that appear. After a short time under constant light, the cutting will revert to vegetative growth; however any manipulation of the photoperiod will throw the plant back into flowering almost instantly.

Clones that are taken from a plant during vegetative growth are much easier to control than clones that are taken from a flowering plant. That is why we generally take clones during the third or forth week of vegetative growth.

Growers can use cloning hormones or rooting hormones, which come in two main formats: powders and gels. Powder hormones are generally used for cloning in soil. The powder is tapped into a small hole in the soil and the cutting is placed into this hole. A small amount of the powder is then added to surface of the soil so that, with successive watering, the powder will seep down into the soil and promote root growth. Rooting gels are much better because they act as a seal, preventing air from reaching the cut zone. In addition, gels are not water soluble, whereas powders tend to be.This means that gels have a longer lifespan than powders.

A proper rooting hormone should contain the vitamin Bl (Thiamine). As an experiment, cut some roots from a test plant and place half of the 'dead' roots into a solution of water and the other half into a solution of water and vitamin Bl.The roots in water with added thiamine will continue to grow for quite some time, while the roots in the plain water solution will die.

The time it takes to root a clone depends on the strain and the cloning method used. Some strains, like Blueberry, are notoriously hard to clone. Others are much easier. On average it takes about a week and half for a clone to develop a root mass suitable for transplantation. Do not be surprised if you find that it takes a set of clones more than three weeks to develop a root mass.The best way to tell whether or not your clones are rooting properly is to clone in batches from the same strain. If some of the clones do not develop a root mass after the others have, chances are that these clones have failed to root.Take one of the clones without any obvious root mass from the medium and pull it up to check for roots. If none have developed then the cutting has failed to root and should be discarded.
You should never let your cloning medium dry out. Keep it damp (not soaking wet) and check for fungi development regularly. Cloning environments containing damp mediums like rockwool are ideal breeding grounds for fungi.

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Originally Posted by kindprincess

On the other hand, some plants when fully grown without topping do not reach their threshold. The strain Blueberry is a good example of this. If you grow Blueberry without topping you won't achieve maximum bud production from that plant, but if you top the Blueberry, you will. Other strains aren't so flexible and the two top colas will simply share the same volume of bud that a single cola would have produced on the same strain.

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Hey KP, it seems like you have a lot of knowledge of blueberry (among other things), a strain I'm growing for the first time. At which node would you recommend to top these babies? I wasn't even planning on topping these until I stumbled on this thread, lucky me! :D I'm doing a SOG style hydro w/ about 20 plants under a 1000w, so I wasn't necessarily looking for lateral bushiness, but since you said topping maximizes the BB strain I need to reevaluate. Thanks for your advice.

Your Boy,
BUD LUV.

http://s119.photobucket.com/albums/o124/chronicchrissy/
Here's a link to some pics, my pics are too big to thumbnail and I don't know how to shrink them. so I'll work through them with you, but backwards because I fucked up.

001(last one) Is my dryer set up with the odor nutralizer attahed to the exhaust fan at the bottom.

002 is a better pic of the tree stand and exhaust fan underneath.

003 is an inside shot of my grow op, right in the middle is the fan and stand, when the plants were smaller I had a screen overtop to sit the plants on but now they are to heavy, so we are moving up to the stage two of the dryer

004 the dark purple is Jaz, and the bright purple is Mrs. Bin Laden

005 Bella is the read one in the middle, and one of my unnamed ones is the orange(see the color difference? Orange is suffering from a little P deficiency) Orange got Fimmed

006 The middle one is foxy and the other two are unnamed(also P deficency for those two), all 3 got FIMmed.

007 is Petti next to her big sis Jaz. I FIMmed both Pettis tops today.

008 is a shot of one of Jazs leaves after flushing and feeding today we had a few blotches on a leaf the are dark green and crispy, also the very tips(less the mm) and most leaves either yellowed or went strait to brown, but it hasn't progressed at all. I dilluted my nutes today but at the same time increased my P to make up for the deficency so that could be it.

009 is one of my last leaves to heal and regenerate after the spider mites almost all other leaves hav healed and many were not quite so bad as that but still pretty patchy, but it's been almost two weeks since.

I flushed today and fed then FIMmed al the plants that weren't going to be cloned(only one from each of the other three) but I'll FIM them after. The clones I'm taking are either really shaded or right at the bottom, so I figured it would be a good chance to experiment a little. Anyways Thanks KP I read your post in my other post and it made me feel a little more prepared.

Let me know what you think guys I'll try to get the pics up here tommorrow and fill you in again. but I'll be kicking around here for a little bit.;)

I totally put that last post in the wrong thread, sorry.:jointsmile: :jointsmile: :jointsmile:

hey sweetie, everythings looking good (even the "not healed" one... spider mites are a bitch. rrrrr!) ok, i'm waking up now, so i'm thinking the pix are gonna be here ;)

budluv, you know, i've completely ignored your thread... and i don't know why... hmmm with a hydrogro, you may not have the room for topping, as you are going sog style. what is the distance between plants? in answer to your question, i top after the tenth nod, which allows 20 main branches (yes, they ALL grow nice colas ;) )

bl, after reviewing your threads, i'd say top after the tenth node (that's three threads now, you should catch me somewhere, lol)

love, kp:p

ok, it may not be 50-60 pix, but i hope it helps (shaking too much for macro)

taking a top from sage for cloning...

here's topping...

finished products...

ttt, i didn't put these up for nuthin...

heres some pics of my topping, and the results... believe me, topping is EASY...

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nice pix, ab ;)

so now in regards to topping....I just did some of mine the other day and made a mess of it as far as topping too many branches that ended up all growing little tops into each and competing for the light. Anyone have a good "plan" on which parts to top...or what order....to maximize good light and space for all the new growth? Does that make sense? I've never had this problem before but for the life of me I can't remember how I was doing it.....just did it and for some reason this time "just did it" did not come up looking the same at all.

top at ten nodes, wait a week or two, then flower...

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Originally Posted by kindprincess

top at ten nodes, wait a week or two, then flower...

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I just FIMed this weekend, well tried, we'll see what happens. And it will take till this weekend atleast before I get the flowering room finished. I picked up the 3gl pails. I can only fit 5 in the dryer. So I figure I can keep the back off the dryer and place the other 2 plants just outside the dryer so they get some MH light, maybe I will move it over a little. And maybe I will hang the HSP bulb over those two plants so that the two lights overlap in the middle giving all the plants a nicer variety of light. I could just wait to transplant till the room is built so I can remove the 2 extra plants(since that is the issue) but they are all ready to the bottom of the pots they are in(I can look though the drainage holes and see little roots, so it's time to transplant).
I just watered the last two days and I want to flush before I transplant, so I need to wait at least 2-3 days before I flush again(They don't like being soggy too long, I learnt that the hard way)

LOL this wouldn't be an issue if believed I could get this done by this weekend. It is easily doable but with work and family to juggle(we have a baby and she is #1 above all) I can just see everything going wrong.

So now I am off the refresh my buzz and cross my fingers and try to utilize every minute of free time.

Chreers:jointsmile: