Is there anything I can do to improve my grow?

[JParker420]

Hey guys, I'm a very inexperienced grower, this being my very first grow ever I've tried my best with these plants, even helping one out when it got a calcium deficiency they're both much healthier now, but I was just wondering if there was any tips I could get to either help this grow or the next one out, for both quality and yield? Any criticism or tips are much appreciated!

This grow was started on the 4th of April, and ever since each plant got 2 sets of spiky leaves, I have been feeding them with a mix of 3-1-2 plant food, 2-3 times a week.

 

[013]

Hi J,

Welcome to 420! Your plants look good, great job on keeping them going. Do you know what strains or if photo or auto

One is tall and stretchy, it’s in flower mode now if I can see correctly. It’s stretched which means it wants more light. Plant looks to be photoperiod. Pic shows flexible shade screen that reduces light, can you take that down?

Is greenhouse in full sun, in full shade or part sun / part shade?

Other plant is short & bushy also in flower. Think this is autoflower.

Are you in us or Canada. Think it’s way too early for plants to be in flower. If you are in USA or Canada then these plants will probably stall out. Then later will reveg and grow funky1 blade leaves and slowly return to normal. Keep them alive is main thing - it may be slow but keep after it.

Topping, fimming or training the plant will help yields. No need to chop on these 2 right now save it for next go round.

On your next set of plants or seedlings use the repot / upcan method. Should be well documented here but basically start in small container like 20 ounce cup, get her healthy af & then upcan to 1 gallon pot. Do same again & jump to 5 gallon or bigger.

Another idea would to be grow them indoors until they look awesome & then move to greenhouse.

Indoors or outdoors always monitor the environment, big ticket item. Can’t grow good weed in poor conditions. What’s your daytime high & nightime low temp. If not gotta monitor it.

What’s in your soil? Looks like it needs aeration like perlite or rice hulls. Study up on nutrients many go to megacrop for simplicity. Most stuff at big box lawn garden hardware store is not going to work.

You need some watering tech real bad. These 2 plants are vastly different. Once you get past seedling stage you need to learn the wet dry cycle & how to maximize that. I’ve got monsters & they don’t get water but once a week. In veg build wet / dry cycle even left her wilt a little bit..... but in flower keep soil moist.

Leaf color, leaf condition and leaf position are the plants way of talking - are you listening? Curled tips, clawing leaves, tip burn - these all mean stuff. Yours look good for now but watch!

lastly read, read, read

Aright bro or bro-ess best of luck to ya! Hope it helps

Swing by my humble new journal & say hi one day!

 

[JParker420]

Hi J,

Welcome to 420! Your plants look good, great job on keeping them going. Do you know what strains or if photo or auto

One is tall and stretchy, it’s in flower mode It’s stretched which means it wants more light. Pic shows flexible shade screen, that reduces light, can you take that down? Is greenhouse in full sun, full shade or part sun / part shade? Think this is photoperiod

Other plant is short & bushy also in flower. Think this is autoflower.

Are you in us or Canada. Think it’s way too early for plants to be in flower. If you are in USA or Canada then these plants will probably stall out. Then later will reveg and grow funky1 blade leaves and slowly return to normal. Keep them alive is main thing it may be slow but keep after it.

Topping, fimming or training the plant will help yields. No need to chop on these 2 right now save it for next go round.

On your next set of plants or seedlings use the repot / upcan method. Should be well documented here but basically start in small container like 20 ounce cup, get her healthy af & then upcan to 1 gallon pot. Do same again & jump to 5 gallon or bigger.

Another idea would to be grow them indoors until they look awesome & then move to greenhouse.

Indoors or outdoors always monitor the environment, big ticket item. Can’t grow good weed in poor conditions. What’s your daytime high & nightime low?

What’s in your soil? Looks like it needs aeration like perlite or rice hulls.

You need some watering tech real bad. These 2 plants are vastly different. Once you get past seedling stage you need to learn the wet dry cycle & how to maximize that. I’ve got monsters & they don’t get water but once a week. In veg build wet / dry cycle even left her wilt a little bit..... but in flower keep soil moist.

lastly read, read, read

Hey there, thank you so much for your comments! I'm in the US, sunny California. Both of them are autos, the stretched one is girl scout cookies and the bushy one is dark devil. For the greenhouse, I definitely can remove the top to allow for more light. It's mainly in the sun except for early morning/late evenings my soil is just regular garden stuff mixed in with about 40% from my compost heap. I haven't done anything special with these plants, besides trying a little bit of low stress training on the bushy one. Didn't really work as I thought, but yknow, worth a try. I'm gonna try starting indoors next time, and trimming the top would've helped. I know I started this grow poorly, with not enough life so it started very stretched. Thank you for all your feedback, after this grow is finished I'm gonna wait till prime time to do my second one. I've done a lot of reading since I planted these!

Just one more question, how long do you think this grow had left? How long till I can harvest these? I'm really bad at judging this

Much thanks mate!

 

[Scottylikesbud]

You want to start lst a bit earlier. And if you want more yeild why top and Finn unless you don’t have the space or light. But outdoors that’s not a problem. Topping adds weeks to the veg stage. Not really something you have here when your growing autos are extra weeks in veg as they go straight to flower in a sprint. So think of it as chopping one leg on a sprinter and asking him to pull the fastest sprint he has ever done in his life. Not going to work out missing his other leg eh? Same with autos. It doesn’t have weeks to recover so what you truly are doing is taking away from yeild in my mind. I used to top when I first started growing and now that I’ve stopped much bigger plants. Bigger plants =bigger yields.
12/12 from seed no topping or defol. Just low stress training and high stress training aka super cropping.
meek 15 1/2 from seed.

both flowers are the same age the lil guy in the corner is 7 1/2 weeks. In another 7 1/2 weeks it’ll quadruple or more in-size it looks like.
Without topping or dimming or defol. You can get monster plants. You want monster plants stop cutting them. Think of yourself as a trainer and the plant an athlete. How do you expect great yeild if your constantly cutting the athlete? Removing limbs? Sorry just my thoughts not trying to bully anyone. I just get frustrated myself seeing people top and fiming and ask for advice on a bigger harvest and better bigger buds. Pretty hard to achieve when cutting you plants. In my experience and opinion.
But I do believe in a very light defol. But with the previous statement. I haven’t defol. This grow.

 

[013]

Look, I’m not the grow master here for sure. I wasn’t pushing topping or fimming, the dude asked how to improve his grow and I gave a boatload of options. If you re-read what I said - I told him one was auto, one was photo & both are in flower - do not cut on these. Also told him they would prob reveg since it’s too early in season.

I didn’t wake up with pruning shears in my hand. I studied 1500 to 2000 pages before I ever bought them. Topping is not meant for autos, everyone knows that. Topping is meant for photoperiods to break the apical dominance of the meristem so she will grow 4, 8,16 or 32 main tops. The idea is to spread the canopy, better air flow, light penetration. Many ways to do that. The main reasons for topping has nothing to do with how tall the tent is. Most folks that top do so knowing they will trade a week of veg for all of the improvements that topping gives.

The main reasons for topping are:
to control shape,
break apical dominance,
better airflow,
create more bud sites,
improved light penetration
and to improve yield.

And the main reasons for not topping are
It’s an auto flower and
Crickets chirping....

Topping is not recommended until after 5 pairs have grown in and you never top a weak plant, that’s just basic 101. If shes not healthy as fuck you don’t top - period. Done correctly topping will barely slow the plant down. Again photos not autos.

Limbs.... Those lowers on a plant that ain’t never gonna throw any smokeable bud in a million years, yep I cut a pair here and there to make clones. Kinda nice when two tiny branches that wasn’t ever gonna do jack - yields another pound premium cheddar because I had the good sense to cut those branches. Now how much is that same tiny pair of lower limbs gonna yield for you?

Think of yourself as the horseshit and I’ll be the pitchfork. Seriously, all runners are athletes, but not all athletes are runners. In a foot race sure pick a runner. How’s the runner gonna do at MMA fight? Not everyone has same goal. Yes we all want to grow, but what’s the main goal? biggest yield, shortest time to flower, highest thc, grow tallest plant, most terpenes, highest brix level, most cbd, best flavor, not paying for weed.

Topping, fimming, manifolding, quadline, lst, pruning, sog, defoliation, suoerncropping, foliar feeding, scrog, cover crop, light deprivation, monster cropping, co2, leaf tucking, exploiting wet/dry cycle, back building, & shitloads more are all simply resources in the growers toolkit. They are all methods of screwing with nature to get what we want.

Now it is obvious that you know more than the thousands of vintners & orchardist across the land who prune there vines & trees every fall then pinch blossoms in spring? Why don’t they let their trees grow naturally?

They can’t tend a tall natural plant, they can’t pick it’s fruit, they can’t apply spray evenly to all areas, there are tons of limbs but very little fruit and it’s scattered so it takes forever to harvest, they have to use cherry picker or ladders, the fruit is ruined because the plant is to thick for the spray to do its job so the insects won.

I mean these guys live and breathe fruit orchards 24 X 7 X 365 for decades. So they top & train. They get light into plant, spray goes on evenly, insects are controlled, they can pick fruit from the ground, better airflow, less fungal disease and the list goes on.

You grow hydro and therefore live by ph & ppm. I never check ph and feed my girls shit so clumpy that I slather it on with a fucking brick masons trowel. If you jab a ppm meter in my water goo mix it would flash “run - it’s fucking quicksand” on the display then yank its own batteries. Many ways to skin a cat my friend, many ways.

Tell me this tho.... with all of the great minds on here - why are the vast majority of the most experienced and well studied growers on this site still topping their plants? BECAUSE IT WORKS for the win.

So step to the podium and preach your No Top method.... but first I’d suggest you read a bit more.

Not topping is standard fare for a ruderalis plant i.e. autos
Yes topping is a very beneficial strategy for sativas & indicas i.e. photoperiods

 

[013]

Hi J,

If those were mine I would just let them run. The trick will be the reveg. If you harvest them now it will dry into couple grams. If you wait til fall it could be more like a regular harvest.

Both plants been stressed already by being on wrong schedule. The plants were preparing for flower and then senescence or slow death but now they have long days and are trying to revert back to veg cycle.

On the bushy plant it’s possible to just snip the tips off. That is to harvest just the buds off but leave the plant in tact. However it’s an auto flower & already pissed off about light change. When it dries it’s gonna shrink so there would only be a tiny amount of bud. Plus these plants were just barely into flower so what bud is there is not potent. Think couple tokes, a speedy head buzz for 10 minutes and then a pounding headache kinda deal.

Either way it’s your call big guy! But please don’t base this just on my word, gather more opinions

I would encourage you to chalk this up to being a newbie, dust yourself off and regroup. We’ve all screwed the pooch before and done stupid shit. My screw ups alone keeps Seedsman in business. I’ve killed more seeds and seedlings than I care to talk about. If you can get more beans ready to germ and let these 2 do there thing. Just keep them alive and they will reward you later.

Hope this helps my friend!

 

[Scottylikesbud]

Hope you feel better about yourself after that hate rant lol. Must have been an awful day ah. Pitch fork and horse sh$t. Good words dude. Stay golden.

what’s the main goal? biggest yield, shortest time to flower,

That’s my main goal, with your methods of training it would take a bit longer to reach them.
with my approach any newbie that can refrain from cutting can get big buds. (Such as me) My 1st year successful year, I’ve been trying to grow for 6 years. I know I’ve made all the dip shit mistakes. Or I would have been having harvesting 6 years ago by now.
The other guy sounds like he has patientce and enough plants and doesnt care how long it takes, To get his seal of approval buds. Of not to big so they rot. Or so little they ugly. Now who’s judging the runners by size now? It’s all just smokable bud right lol. They all beautiful. Oh and the buds on the lower branches like this lol

didn’t wake up with pruning shears in my hand. I studied 1500 to 2000 pages

Hmm dont think we have read your book on how to defol and what not.

The main reasons for topping are:
to control shape,
break apical dominance,
better airflow,
create more bud sites,
improved light penetration
and to improve yield.

Can get all these without topping in something called super cropping. But the tip continues to grow instead of being cut off and tossed or cloned.

that hanging cola is the lowest branch I guess it isn’t going to amount to much of a yeild at harvest though. Oh well I fucked up I guess haha.
And the other plant

The other side of the bucket

they still growing.
idk about your method bro. No pics or it didn’t happen.

I’m loving my no top nodefol. I do want to defol but as I made a plan before I germination,To not defol. I am sticking with it. Can’t be swayed by all these other aggressive posters. Every time they tell you to defol. Or top. They have been doing it for years.where as new growers like us get bullied into there mentality. With no experience. Easy to be taken advantage of. And take pot shots at for fun. They see no topping no defoliating posters like me as you read it yourself

Think of yourself as the horseshit and I’ll be the pitchfork. Seriously, all runners are athletes, but not all athletes are runners.

Now I’m not soft like this generation I am laughing my ass off that you took your sweet time trying to insult me. Your definitely not the first to try something like this.
Gosh the next time you post a hate rant. Remember it’s there to stay.

Now to the op. You’ve got two excellent opposing views that both grow buds.
it’s up to you to decide on what kind of grower you are,
Now if I was planting 10 or more plants I would definitely have to resort to topping and defol for sure. But as I am only growing a few. They can take up all the space they need.
Lol bud rot. It happens. (Not to me) My humidity hasn’t gone above 55% not so worried.
64%and higher are dangerous though. If I recall correctly.
But look at the other guys magnificent examples of topping and defoliation. Look at them just perfect, not to big, not to small buds. free of bud rot. Or insects.
damn look at All those great photos he shared with us all. Excellent examples. You have swayed me on harsh love alone lol. Have a nice day.

 

[Scottylikesbud]

to be honest 80% of the grow is proper watering and nutrients and ph once you get that down. The Other 20% is just how you decide to go about training your plants. So get your water down or soil down dude. That’s where most the magic is happening at. After you got control of that I’d worry about training. As a plant will want to grow no matter what you do to it. They are living things, they have a strong will to grow. They want to grow to bear seeds to preserve the species. They just don’t want to wither up and die.

 

[Scottylikesbud]

Limbs.... Those lowers on a plant that ain’t never gonna throw any smokeable bud in a million years,

I believe all bud is smokeable like these off my last harvest? No topping. Light defol before flower.

yeah those are my small buds from not topping and not defoliation. Pretty bleeping terrible alright. Look at that horse shit. Look at that large bud rot ridden buds. Infested.totally disgusting. Look at all that non smokable bud. Lol man I’m a piece of shit. Thanks for calling me out Sir.
Here’s more horse shit for you

Now I’ve gotta go wash up all my horse shit I guess good day to you fine folks.

 

[Scottylikesbud]

So step to the podium and preach your No Top method.... but first I’d suggest you read a bit more.

Always read a bit more my friend.

why are the vast majority of the most experienced and well studied growers on this site still topping their plants? BECAUSE IT WORKS for the win

Key word is experienced. Please Keep in mind you are dealing with new growers.
With little to no experience.

Why don’t they let their trees grow naturally?

Because they believe they are helping the plant grow better suited for their own purposes.
there’s nothing natural about most of them tree farmers. Planting foreign foods and fruits not native to the land destroying the natural surrounding ecosystem throwing the ecological balances off a cliff.

Damn the nature that was here first. sustaining the natural habitat and wild life. Continue poisoning the water table with fertilizers and pesticides and insecticides. Fungicides.
#where are the bees.

Promoting algae booms so that whole beaches are closed down from people getting sick and dying.

Suck the rivers dry for the farms. Its being put to good use. Look at the Colorado river. And how it runs beautifully into the great ocean

Suck up all the ground water it’s also being put to good use

watch the earth sink while it cracks under stress.

Nothing natural about them farmers. And I’m not saying there all the same. There are some that take this into mind are responsible.
Meanwhile humanity be like, why The world looking all messed up? Never happened before. Something must have changed lol. Something must be causing these new problems right? Lol

 

[Canadadoes]

I’m just gonna slowly back up and close the door behind me.

 

[Scottylikesbud]

I am sorry guys I got carried away. Having a freshly sprained ankle, waking up in pain and Then waking up to Some rude comments. Was not a great combo to start off the day.

and my reaction to that was very immature of myself. I feel pretty bad about it now,
And see how it was also aggressive.
my bad.
I don’t intend to spread any negativity in this forum.
As I just got first hand experience of this negativity game.
It’s not good.
Sorry.

 

[Canadadoes]

@Scottylikesbud,
That is very admirable buddy. It takes a real man/woman to admit that. We all have bad days. It’s all good in my eyes.

 

[CanadianJim]

So, in my experience, topping is strain dependent. Some do really well, some don't. If you can, grow two, top one, LST or supercrop the other, see which works best for what you're growing. Even better, use a couple of clones.
I took clones from a Master Kush, topped one half let the other half grow. Main colas averaged out to 1.5 times as much bud on the topped plants. Rest of the harvest, topped plants outperformed, not by too much, but enough.
Did the same with Silver Haze, opposite results. Lesson learned.
I wouldn't top an auto. I just don't think it has enough veg time to be worth it. I would LST though.
But all this is for your next harvest. You're doing pretty well so far, just keep 'em alive now, the more light you can give them the better.
Good work, and Good luck!

 

[013]

I was helping the poster and you jump in like I’m crazy for mentioning topping?? When you throw weak sauce at me like runners and limbs then yeah - fair game I will respond accordingly.

You yourself said you didn’t understand why people cut their plants, so I elaborated. Still you have not refuted the points and there were many. Your pictures only prove that you have grown some buds.

Never claimed to write a book, but Cervantes heavily documented topping techniques and benefits. Funny it seems the agricultural industry heavily utilizes this technique with great success. No it’s not meant for all crops or scenarios.

The concept of topping stands on its own merits and does not need your seal of approval, nor mine.

The fact remains - topping is a great tool for many crops, to deny this is sheer ignorance.

 

[013]

Scotty, dude I have no probs with you. Ok but what’s happening with hydro & auto is not the same as photos. Topping is a bold move, and beginners are willing to roll the dice, but yeah there are rules. Anyway homes no sweat, & I can apologize too. I wanted to say my piece & move on.

You got some nice buds there too.

Peace out!