As always when receiving advice from others, take it with a grain of salt, solicit multiple sources for your advice, and assume that the giver of the advice is well-meaning (one hopes, lol) but is no expert and certainly not THE Expert.
Well, if that is just a step in a continuing strategy to promote branching and low-growing behavior, as opposed to tall and less branched, then I'd say you're out of room, lol.
If it was done to give you multiple colas, and you're no longer actively training, then I guess that the remainder of your plants' growth will be in the traditional (upward, towards the light) manner.
People have grown at a considerably more dense plant spacing than you have. I've seen nine plants per square foot before. I'd call that "extreme SoG." Growing in two-liter hempy soda pop bottles became pretty popular here for a while thanks to a former member's success (and journal of same). Maybe a grow that had larger plants, at an accordingly greater spacing, would be considered to be "BIG SoG," lol? Your plant density is still going to be high, in that there's no space between them. You're just accomplishing it with a smaller number of larger plants. There's no room for extensive branching, because they'd be in furious competition with all of their neighbors. My guess is that you will (or at least can) still have a dense canopy, which means that there won't be much light-penetration deep into it. Instead of "lollipopping" many single-cola plants so that the plant matter (other than the stems, obviously) is up at the canopy level and there is no undergrowth, you'll be doing the same - only with eight colas on one plant instead of eight single-cola plants. So the same strategy (more or less) would probably apply.
With one difference: I expect your plants to get considerably taller than the average SoG. My gut tells me that your canopy will "want" to be thicker because of this, but (again) the same rules apply. So I can see the potential for more wasted effort, so to speak. By that I mean that you might realize at some point that the lower portion of said canopy has a lot of growth, but just isn't getting enough light. Therefore, I would probably be more aggressive in removing lower growth, to combat my natural urge to NOT remove healthy portions of the plants. A branch growing very low under the canopy is obviously a candidate for removal - but branches that are actually at the lower level of the canopy can be more difficult to consider to be waste. One of those "heart vs. mind" things (or "thought vs. feeling"), maybe.
Unfortunately, I'm operating on minutes of sleep since Saturday, worked today, and am not at my best. I cannot remember: Are your plants currently in flower? Are they all clones from the same mother? I once would have asked, "Are they all the same strain?" But breeders - and "breeders" - seem to delight in crossing every strain they have (or that they can score from other breeders) with every other strain, and then selling those seeds instead of spending time / plant generations attempting to fully stabilize the results and reduce the expected number of different phenotypes. Therefore, it might be best to treat multiple plants (grown from seed, instead of clones from a single mother plant) of the same strain as being multiple strains. IOW, growth behavior and even flowering times might vary significantly among plants of the same strain. And there is the question of whether they are indica-dominant, sativa-dominant, or middle of the road hybrids. If you are growing indicas and indica-dominant hybrids, where both general growth and the stretch (the first 40% of the flowering period) will be less than with sativas... Well, especially if you are not growing those exclusively, I would make sure to keep telling myself, "Do not wait too long to make the switch to flowering." Because I've been putting off dealing with a grow where I allowed the plants to become too large. I have considerably less plants, lol - but I also have considerably less space. If I simply switched to flowering now, I'd probably end up with lots of little buds (which doesn't really bother me at this point in my life). But I strongly suspect that my gross yield would be a lot smaller, too. They simply will not be able to "Be... All that they can be!" (in the Army
) . There's a high sativa content in my plants' genetics, so the stretch would be a show-stopper, IMHO. As a matter of fact, I would be perfectly happy if there was NO stretch whatsoever (which is patently impossible :rolleyes3 ). So... issues. So do not wait too long, lol, or the stretch will get you.
I feel like I've been up for days and even I wouldn't trust my advice right now....
