SoilGirl
Well-Known Member
caught up in here as well 
looks gorgeous MF. Sorry about your losses to those gnats......
Personally I think 'fim'ming outdoors (and indoors of course) is great, the more tops the merrier and its not that hard as long as the plant is old enough to fim. Topping can be done earlier than Fimming in my experience, although it's more stressful it's also more successful because there's no option left for the plant but to take to your top or die (and they've never died in my experience) once you've removed the whole tip of new growth down to the node.
With fims its different because the plant isn't left with an 'early life ultimatum moment' like with tops. Since you aren't cutting off the whole node in a fim, the node can almost always keep growing regularly (as a single top, otherwise you cut it too low and its a top instead of a fim effectively anyways) after it gets over the shock and stunt, you'll just have some ugly leaves and lose a week or two of growth to the stunt. The plant at that stage isn't worried about getting you a big fat harvest of sticky buds, its focused on survival and isn't going to bother trying to grow 4 new nodes for you off a single cut you made when it can just save its energy for a week and get back to what it was doing before you assaulted it with a premature 'fim'.
Those are my theories on it anyways , I wonder what others think about it. I've always been able to do tops as early as I want; though they can give some bad shock, they've always given me 2 tops. I've always failed when I've tried to fim early...always. I think tops can be started once there's at least 3-4 node spots, and you should wait to do fims 'til about 6-7. That's at least going to be the rule of thumb I use for myself from now on, since my latest fim fail.
looks gorgeous MF. Sorry about your losses to those gnats......Personally I think 'fim'ming outdoors (and indoors of course) is great, the more tops the merrier and its not that hard as long as the plant is old enough to fim. Topping can be done earlier than Fimming in my experience, although it's more stressful it's also more successful because there's no option left for the plant but to take to your top or die (and they've never died in my experience) once you've removed the whole tip of new growth down to the node.
With fims its different because the plant isn't left with an 'early life ultimatum moment' like with tops. Since you aren't cutting off the whole node in a fim, the node can almost always keep growing regularly (as a single top, otherwise you cut it too low and its a top instead of a fim effectively anyways) after it gets over the shock and stunt, you'll just have some ugly leaves and lose a week or two of growth to the stunt. The plant at that stage isn't worried about getting you a big fat harvest of sticky buds, its focused on survival and isn't going to bother trying to grow 4 new nodes for you off a single cut you made when it can just save its energy for a week and get back to what it was doing before you assaulted it with a premature 'fim'.
Those are my theories on it anyways , I wonder what others think about it. I've always been able to do tops as early as I want; though they can give some bad shock, they've always given me 2 tops. I've always failed when I've tried to fim early...always. I think tops can be started once there's at least 3-4 node spots, and you should wait to do fims 'til about 6-7. That's at least going to be the rule of thumb I use for myself from now on, since my latest fim fail.
I'm too young to know every Bob Dylan song.... but I love All Along the Watchtower 
) 
those in laws and relatives must have hit you like D-Day.. fight them off like Teddy said! 
