supporting plant

[HIGHGROOVE]

just would like to get the communities ideas on supporting the plant from start to finish....in my current situation i have a few that are in second week of flower maybe two or so feet tall what would you suggest at this point stakes? and best way to connect plant to stake...and also whats your favorite way from start to finish

 

[FreezerBoy]

You shouldn't need stakes. If they're falling over, something's wrong with your methods. Too hot, too little light, food deficiencies, etc. Make sure to beat them up every day to toughen them up. Shake the stalk and stems to simulate wind and passing animals.

 

[sparkjumper]

I have to disagree with that,if my plants arent falling over from the weight of the buds after day 40,I've grown some crap or done something wrong.I like to use 4 or 5 ft bamboo stakes but I grow big clones.I usually dont tie my plants to the stake I just support them as best I can.Before I started using R/O water and flowering with co2,I rarely had this problem but now Its a part of every grow and I wouldnt have it any other way lol!

 

[HIGHGROOVE]

jsut one bamboo stick per plant and secure it with the wire or the velcro...ideas please?

 

[fishheadbob]

Some plants need support, some don't. For smaller guys that need support I start with a toothpick and progress to a chopstick or wooden kabob skewer, usually using a twistie to tie them on. Most don't need support after that, but if they're too topheavy with buds (Yippee), I'll drop a thin string down from above and tie one to the string.

 

[sparkjumper]

Everybodys case is going to be different because of size and numbers of plants.I basically fill my 8 by 8 room with 4 ft flowering plants in the end so I do what I can.I lean them against each other in a sort of puzzle to keep the branches off the floor.I always use the walls as support for the plants on the periphery.And the stakes of course.I'm about a week away right now and they are drooping every which way which is good.If it finishes straight and firm with no need of support whatsoever I'm not a happy person

 

[ogatec]

You shouldn't need stakes. If they're falling over, something's wrong with your methods. Too hot, too little light, food deficiencies, etc. Make sure to beat them up every day to toughen them up. Shake the stalk and stems to simulate wind and passing animals.

not true in my situation, i grow a plant thats 50/50 sat/ind. the stems are thin & small like a sativa but i have fat skunky buds, so after the 6th week i have branches splitting & falling over. to remedy i put up a trellis for support after the 2nd week of flowering which allows the plants to grow into it.

in nature im sure most plants can support their weight, but you have to remember that todays crosses are man-made. they wouldnt have ever happened in nature.

 

[sparkjumper]

Even a thick short bushy plant like Northern Lights will have problems with being unsupported in any way.Yesterday when I was watering I had to take some speaker wire and tie a few branches that were literally touching the floor to the main stalk.Its not the best but I'm only maybe a week away.Sag NL #9 produced some definate quarter pound or better plants of decent quality.Sensi northern lights are thin leafed 5-6 ft scraggly shitty plants that wasted a 1K horty for 2 months the fucks

 

[DrunkenMessiah]

HAHAHAHA!!

ahh, *wipes a tear* oh dear.

This always cracks me up. So many modern high-output growers always struggle to keep their super-high-yielding plants upright. You people have gone to the ends of the earth to increase nutrient uptake. Advanced hydroponics, hormone treatments, starve and flush cycles, CO2 supplementation. You have done all of this while your plants are still trying to take nutrients up through the equivalent of a drinking straw. Its retarded.

Even a thick short bushy plant like Northern Lights will have problems with being unsupported in any way.Yesterday when I was watering I had to take some speaker wire and tie a few branches that were literally touching the floor to the main stalk.Its not the best but I'm only maybe a week away.Sag NL #9 produced some definate quarter pound or better plants of decent quality.Sensi northern lights are thin leafed 5-6 ft scraggly shitty plants that wasted a 1K horty for 2 months the fucks

I have seen countless convoluted solutions to this issue. Strings, stakes, screens, the list goes on. Some solutions are actually very good, I fully endorse ScrOG, but most are just silly wastes of time.

People; the time is now, come to the Dark Side, you need to supercrop! The vascular systems of my supercropped plants scoff at stakes, sneer at strings; they require no help staying erect even when weighed down with more than 5 ounces (post-curing) of bud each! I've regularly had plants finish well under 24 inches tall whilst yielding in excess of a quarter pound of toke. Keep in mind, these sub-two-foot plants had stem cross-sections larger than one inch in diameter at the base. Supercropping causes a plant's maximum nutrient uptake capabilities to go through the roof! Shorter stronger plants, denser buds, larger yields, lower maintenance and higher growth rates all result from diligent supercropping. A link to my own pictorial guide on supercropping and ScrOG training can be found in the first post of the thread that the link in my sig takes you to. Abandon your stakes fellow gardeners; lay down your strings, put away the tomato cages and step back from limp and floppy cannabis forever. Join the supercropping revolution! its just me at the moment, I could use the company

Good luck and happy gardening!

-DM

 

[dongle69]

...they require no help staying erect even when weighed down with more than 5 ounces (post-curing) of bud each! I've regularly had plants finish well under 24 inches tall whilst yielding in excess of a quarter pound of toke. Keep in mind, these sub-two-foot plants had stem cross-sections larger than one inch in diameter at the base.

Pics?

 

[T.Baggins]

Pics?

I would also like to see this

 

[DrunkenMessiah]

Pics?

*sigh* I do have pics, but sadly none of it is of supercropping working on the cannabis plant. All of my work currently published on the internets is of tomato plants. Tomato vines are, horticulturally, very similar to cannabis. They have similar nutrient, (tomatoes like higher potassium during fruiting, cannabis prefers more phosphates, but they are otherwise identical) temperature, soil and other environmental needs. Here is an example of a 10 day old supercropped tomato plant:

The plant is not yet 2 weeks old and already has a stem cross section between 1/4 and 1/2 of an inch along with two new offshoots (known as 'suckers' in tomato growing circles).

One week later:

The main stem has already blown past the 1/2 inch mark and is now too tough to supercrop any more. You literally can put your fingers on the stem and squeeze as hard as you can, the stem doesn't give even a millimeter and your figers start to hurt. Notice the inter-nodal gaps. Tomatoes grow leaves in pairs when they are young but then start to alternate later on just like cannabis. Look how close the leaf-nodes are to eachother. I've got 3 nodes packed into just 1 inch of vertical stem space. On a cannabis plant, each one of these nodes is a potential bud location! A foot tall plant grown this way could have DOZENS of colas! On top of that, the beefed-up vascular system allows the plants to support disproportionately HUGE organs.

This is the leaf of a 17 day old plant. It is over a foot long and would eventually grow to longer than 18 inches. NOBODY on the gardenweb forums had seen a tomato leaf this large on any plant of any age of any breed, let alone one so young! I speak from expirience when I say that cannabis plants behave EXACTLY the same way when given this treatment. I've had fat sativa leaves the size of dinner plates, you could tie string to them and wear them like a mask. These where not outdoor plants, they grew under moderate 400 watt HID bulbs. The bigger vascular structure that supercropping generates makes everything on the plant bigger as a result, BUDS INCLUDED!!!

I lament the fact that I have no pictoral evidence to show for the success of supercropping on cannabis plants. I will hopefully have that situation rectified before the end of this month. We shall see.

This is not bullshit guys, I swear by supercropping for increaced yields. It will be interesting to see how many people I can get to try it before I have to embarass everyone by posting pictures. The race is on. I would love to blow everyone away with pics of my cannabis supercropping results, but I think I would love it even more if someone else took my advice and beat me to the punch. Good luck and happy gardening!

-DM

 

[magiccannabus]

I have a pair of pliers with a smooth, toothless jaw, and I carefully take them to the bottom stems of my girls and give them a good squeeze until I start to hear unpleasant sounds, and then I stop. It definitely is toughening them up. My Purple Haze has needed this the most since it keeps toppling over if I don't support it! The main stem on her is thick too! She just is such a floppy plant. Beating the shit out of the stem really does work, just be super careful!

 

[dongle69]

DrunkenMessiah, I am familiar with supercropping and many people do it here on icmag, I just wanted to see some pics of your claims.
Please "embarrass" us with some pics of your 5 oz sub 2 ft plants!

 

[bongoie]

anything from a toothpic to an auld branch for floppy seedlings , started doing my seedlings in the middle of the pot and add more soil as it rises . . last grow i tied 1 falling bud against its opposite to hold each other up , usually only need to support near the end of flower . not favouring the canes/bamboo as i like my lights up close + personal an have a tight grow room

 

[T.Baggins]

DrunkenMessiah, I am familiar with supercropping and many people do it here on icmag, I just wanted to see some pics of your claims.
Please "embarrass" us with some pics of your 5 oz sub 2 ft plants!

"more than 5 ounces (post-curing) of bud".... man i was hoping to see some pics.... those tomato plants don't even look that great, oh well..

 

[DrunkenMessiah]

Hah, I would dearly like to have shown you. That claim must sound pretty radical, but you have to understand that it wasn't really all that much. There where four plants under an air cooled 1000 watt hortilux HPS and they averaged a little over 5 ounces each for the total harvest which was 20 and 1/4 ounces or just over 575 grams. This means we got just barely over .5 grams per watt which is PATHETIC under a large HID lamp. Old pros like Bushy Older Grower could push over 1 gram per watt, usually getting more than TWO POUNDS from the same amount of light that I was using. I was in no way boasting when I posted those numbers (and trust me, I love to brag) and was merely trying to make the point that you can get good per-plant-yields from very short individuals withough having to resort to tying down the plants, or screen training or something along those lines.

-DM

 

[DrunkenMessiah]

I have a pair of pliers with a smooth, toothless jaw, and I carefully take them to the bottom stems of my girls and give them a good squeeze until I start to hear unpleasant sounds, and then I stop. It definitely is toughening them up. My Purple Haze has needed this the most since it keeps toppling over if I don't support it! The main stem on her is thick too! She just is such a floppy plant. Beating the shit out of the stem really does work, just be super careful!

Aha! Normally I would not recommend supercropping with a tool, but it makes sense in your case. If you are going to wait until the plant gets a bit up to size before you start supercropping then this can help. I personally supercrop by hand only, doing it this way gives you a better feel for what is going on underneath. See, this is why I consider what I do different. As dongle69 duly noted, supercropping isn't particularly exotic around these parts. However, I have noted that the technique seems to only ever used in 2 scenarios:

ScrOG. If you really want to 'weave' your plants with a ScrOG setup the crimping technique becomes necessary.

Retro-fit. Just like MagicCannabis was talking about. Pinching the stem when the plant gets particularly gangly, or crushing it in a small location towards the bottom as the plant grows.

What I am talking about is complete supercropping, starting when the plant is very young (as its first set of serrated leaves come in) and continually crimping every new stem section that comes along, sometimes multiple times in the same place. Eventually, the stem goes rigid. It becomes so hard that you cannot crush it with your fingers. The cropping can be timed strategically with stretch in order to produce the 5 ounce 2 foot plant.

The main stalk was crimped continuously as the plants went through veg (which was short; two days shy of 3 weeks), but the offshoots: the budsites that grow off of each place that a main fan leaf joins with the main stem where mostly left alone at first. The plants where then thrown into flower and the little un-crimped offshoots went ballistic and quickly grew to the same height as the top of the main stem. Even the very lowest cola sites, which would normally be completely shaded out, shot to the top of the canopy; which wasn't very far away because of the constant supercroping of the main stem. As soon as the offshoot was around the same height as the main stem (didn't take long, even the lowest ones made it before the plants even sexed, most of them could easily have grown much taller) it was aggressively supercropped entirely up and down its stem. The slender-stemmed offshoots responded by going almost totally limp for a day or two before bulking up dramatically and twisting back towards the light. The end result was, as I said initially, dozens of colas per plant. Each of said colas where at canopy heigth, there wasn't a single bud on the plants that was left to languish any more than an inch or two lower than the main central cola.

Gardeners usually top their plants repeatedly, or use the FIM technique, to get a similar result. The difference is though that those growers sacrifice having a 'crown' or head cola. Our squat supercropped monstrosities did have head colas, and pretty substantial ones at that. The fuckers had to contain 1/3 of the plants' yield. Honestly though, they weren't all that big compared to so many of the supercolas grown benieth 1000 watt bulbs, they just looked comically large because they where mounted on knee-high plants! The results where pretty epic from a height standpoint. 5 ounces from a sub-24 inch free-standing plant is really good. Sounded too good to dongle69 and T.Baggins, perhaps rightfully so. However, taken in the context of the grow situation the 5 ounce a plant number kindof sucks. I think we hamstringed ourselves with the super-short veg. Had they been allowed to veg for perhaps twice that long I'm not sure what would have happened. I went with the short veg because I wanted to see my idea of a sortof no-strings-attatched ScrOG. This is the result we got, an almost totally flat bud surface, but it came at the cost of total yield for our given wattage. Still have to work the kinks out of total supercropping for big-watt appliacations, but it works wonders in the realm of medium-powered HID lamps and ESPECIALLY any kind of floro grow. Good luck and happy gardening!

-DM

 

[sparkjumper]

Yes I would like to see 5 oz plants that finish smaller than 24 inches but I think I'll only see them in dreams lol.And if you water a tomato plant the same way you water a cannabis plant your tomato plant will be shit.You cant let the soil go very dry on a mater plant like you should with cannabis.At least all the mater plants I've grown need water more consistently

 

[magiccannabus]

Normally I would never use a tool to smash stems either, but in the case of my Purple Haze, the main stem is so strong that I couldn't do it by hand anyway, I NEED a tool, which is odd considering how floppy the stem is. It's a thick trunk on her, but for some reason she's got a flexible main stem. Oddly enough, her smaller limbs break more easily than any of the other plants. On all my others, I have so far managed to do most of it by hand.