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To thin out or not to
- Thread starter EarthElf
- Start date
Leroy Brown
Member
8 t5's doesn't mean much to me, don't they come in different sizes & wattages?
Everyones circumstances & environment is different...... different outcomes & desires, and throw strains into the mix and the situations are limitless.....
With that said, if you were to just give me what you had there in those pics, and said "do with them as you please" ..... I would buy a 1k or two 600's, up-pot them & put them into flower at the same time (while making sure to introduce the HID's at a far distance). Then a few days later start attempts to level the canopy as much as possible through a combination of taking clones & breaking/bending branches.
Everyones circumstances & environment is different...... different outcomes & desires, and throw strains into the mix and the situations are limitless.....
With that said, if you were to just give me what you had there in those pics, and said "do with them as you please" ..... I would buy a 1k or two 600's, up-pot them & put them into flower at the same time (while making sure to introduce the HID's at a far distance). Then a few days later start attempts to level the canopy as much as possible through a combination of taking clones & breaking/bending branches.
M
MacGyver420
thin them out for sure;
concentrate all the plants growth into its main shoots up top near the light; anything else should be trimmed away
especially when you are working with low light situations like t5's less is more.
concentrate all the plants growth into its main shoots up top near the light; anything else should be trimmed away
especially when you are working with low light situations like t5's less is more.
V
Vampire
Ditto all of the above comments. Waaay to many branches and leaves for your light situation. Also they look stressed out; have you been watering them regularly? Did you make drainage holes on the bottom of the pots? very important to have run off water. All those branches on the bottom of the plants would be a good time to try cloning with them. Leaving them on the plant will only take away sugars and such that is beneficial to the tops of your plants.
YOUR GROWTH IS JUST ABOUT RIGHT IF YOU FLOWER RIGHT NOW AND DO A LITTLE UNDER TRIMMING!
i dunno once you start doing multiple runs in the same space you start to realize that to hit that 1 gram per watt range you need your growth to be very very dense in growth tips, all throughout the depth of penetration, being that you are using t5's you probably shouldn't expect quality buds to go down more than ten inches from the top of the canopy, basically you want as many growth tips as possible in that top ten inches of canopy, while trimming away any growth below that ten inches of depth because anything below that will be fluffy, immature, and not worth smoking imo, also it will draw growth from the upper nodes to make the fluffy popcorn so you will lose a little yield in the optimum 10 inches if you don't get rid of the stuff below it.
one thing to note is that the more nodes per plant you have when you start flowering the slower growth will be, 1 plant with 50 nodes covering 1 square foot will grow much slower, and yield a little less than 4 plants with 12 nodes each, covering the same 1 square foot, because the total growth gets divided by the number of nodes per plant. people run into problems when they try to do a 4 by 4 foot scrog with only one plant, and end up with way too many nodes, so rather than a few fat colas you get hundreds of tiny fluffy buds...
with t5's your best yielding setup would be a tight scrog, because penetration is only a 10 inches deep, you don't want to waste any time or electricity growing them taller than 10 inches, obviously that's not usually possible...but clones flowered the day they are transplanted, end up 12 to 18 inches tall, and can be places less than 4 inches apart...that's about as short as you can get them, cutting your veg time to zero, giving you more overhead room for the light, and ensures you wont end up with 2 feet of bare stalks with a 10 inch bud on top of that...growth gets dense but with a little defoliation and tucking fan leaves under buds, you will definitely yield more with a dense canopy over a really loose canopy, assuming you haven't over done it and gone to dense...
now in your case...personally i don't think your growth is overly dense at all, although to be honest when i grow bush style and start flowering each of my individual bushes have about 4 inches between them so that they can fill in during the first two weeks of budding(the stretch)...so if you did flower them right now they would probably get a liiiiitle tad bit dense, but i think if during that first two weeks of budding you trimmed any of the lower branches that didn't stretch to the top of the canopy, and any nodes under the final 10 inch "effective budding zone" it would be a little more loose, probably optimum...
when it comes to trimming lower branches and growth tips i like to remember 3 key points;
1. is that if you trim a popcorn bud after its larger, that energy will never go back to the main buds, but if you get them when they are very small, the energy that would have been spent making those nodes will have been saved and used to fatten up the upper buds(that's what you want) so for yield the faster you trim those nodes off the better.
2. you have to be wary not to overdue it... if you haven't reached that "over-dense" point where everything turns to popcorn(too many nodes per plant per volume), then you don't gain anything by trimming in that "effective budding zone" of ten inches below the top of the canopy. you will in fact be trimming growth tips that would have possible turned into well developed buds and will be cutting back on your final quality yield by a lot. knowing where that stage of "too dense" is is key, but obviously you can't get there without lowering the quality of a harvest, so trial and error, and a good mentor can really get you too the point where you realize exactly how thick growth can be to optimize yield, and at what point being to dense starts to lower yield. since you don't' know what this point is all you can do is guess and compare results to future grows. if you prune too early, expecting a lot of stretch, and then your plants don't stretch much, you could end up taking a loooot of yield off your plants and leaving them scraggly and stemmy.
3. my third point is that when you do defoliate or trim it stunts or slows growth down, potentially lowering yeilds, the key is to do a little at a time, or trim early enough that the growth is all very small, cutting a tiny new growth tip slows a plant less than a full sized branch would.
so it's basically a balancing act, it's in your plants best interests to trim offending undergrowth as soon as it shows, but you need to be careful not to overdue it, and that can be hard when it's your first time growing a certain strain, or your first time growing all together. since for you, it's mostly trial and error, i would recommend trimming undergrowth in stages, 3 or 4 days apart, for the first two weeks of budding, then taper off after that...start with the very lowest growth and work your way up, so you don't end up cutting into your "effective budding zone" after a few grows you will know just how much to leave so don't overdue it, if you under due it at least you will definitively know at the end you made a mistake, if you over trim, it wont be so obvious and defining that magic density point will be much harder.
if i were you i would throw them into flowering asap, and lightly trim the bottom over the next 2 weeks, starting with the lowest growth, and gradually moving up, so that at the end of two weeks you have about 10 inches of lush, thick canopy, and no growth tips below that 10 inches.
your plans look fairly happy and healthy, i think you are gonna be very happy with your results! oh, and i'm not sure all of this stuff applies to the tomato plants i see you have in there as well lol. in the future you should try companioning with snow peas, mites love them more than pot so all your spider mites will flock to them, especially if they are the tallest plants in the room, and since you don't' have to smoke or eat them you can load them full of harsh mite poisons so those mites that leave your plants to crawl to the snow peas will die out pretty fast...
i dunno once you start doing multiple runs in the same space you start to realize that to hit that 1 gram per watt range you need your growth to be very very dense in growth tips, all throughout the depth of penetration, being that you are using t5's you probably shouldn't expect quality buds to go down more than ten inches from the top of the canopy, basically you want as many growth tips as possible in that top ten inches of canopy, while trimming away any growth below that ten inches of depth because anything below that will be fluffy, immature, and not worth smoking imo, also it will draw growth from the upper nodes to make the fluffy popcorn so you will lose a little yield in the optimum 10 inches if you don't get rid of the stuff below it.
one thing to note is that the more nodes per plant you have when you start flowering the slower growth will be, 1 plant with 50 nodes covering 1 square foot will grow much slower, and yield a little less than 4 plants with 12 nodes each, covering the same 1 square foot, because the total growth gets divided by the number of nodes per plant. people run into problems when they try to do a 4 by 4 foot scrog with only one plant, and end up with way too many nodes, so rather than a few fat colas you get hundreds of tiny fluffy buds...
with t5's your best yielding setup would be a tight scrog, because penetration is only a 10 inches deep, you don't want to waste any time or electricity growing them taller than 10 inches, obviously that's not usually possible...but clones flowered the day they are transplanted, end up 12 to 18 inches tall, and can be places less than 4 inches apart...that's about as short as you can get them, cutting your veg time to zero, giving you more overhead room for the light, and ensures you wont end up with 2 feet of bare stalks with a 10 inch bud on top of that...growth gets dense but with a little defoliation and tucking fan leaves under buds, you will definitely yield more with a dense canopy over a really loose canopy, assuming you haven't over done it and gone to dense...
now in your case...personally i don't think your growth is overly dense at all, although to be honest when i grow bush style and start flowering each of my individual bushes have about 4 inches between them so that they can fill in during the first two weeks of budding(the stretch)...so if you did flower them right now they would probably get a liiiiitle tad bit dense, but i think if during that first two weeks of budding you trimmed any of the lower branches that didn't stretch to the top of the canopy, and any nodes under the final 10 inch "effective budding zone" it would be a little more loose, probably optimum...
when it comes to trimming lower branches and growth tips i like to remember 3 key points;
1. is that if you trim a popcorn bud after its larger, that energy will never go back to the main buds, but if you get them when they are very small, the energy that would have been spent making those nodes will have been saved and used to fatten up the upper buds(that's what you want) so for yield the faster you trim those nodes off the better.
2. you have to be wary not to overdue it... if you haven't reached that "over-dense" point where everything turns to popcorn(too many nodes per plant per volume), then you don't gain anything by trimming in that "effective budding zone" of ten inches below the top of the canopy. you will in fact be trimming growth tips that would have possible turned into well developed buds and will be cutting back on your final quality yield by a lot. knowing where that stage of "too dense" is is key, but obviously you can't get there without lowering the quality of a harvest, so trial and error, and a good mentor can really get you too the point where you realize exactly how thick growth can be to optimize yield, and at what point being to dense starts to lower yield. since you don't' know what this point is all you can do is guess and compare results to future grows. if you prune too early, expecting a lot of stretch, and then your plants don't stretch much, you could end up taking a loooot of yield off your plants and leaving them scraggly and stemmy.
3. my third point is that when you do defoliate or trim it stunts or slows growth down, potentially lowering yeilds, the key is to do a little at a time, or trim early enough that the growth is all very small, cutting a tiny new growth tip slows a plant less than a full sized branch would.
so it's basically a balancing act, it's in your plants best interests to trim offending undergrowth as soon as it shows, but you need to be careful not to overdue it, and that can be hard when it's your first time growing a certain strain, or your first time growing all together. since for you, it's mostly trial and error, i would recommend trimming undergrowth in stages, 3 or 4 days apart, for the first two weeks of budding, then taper off after that...start with the very lowest growth and work your way up, so you don't end up cutting into your "effective budding zone" after a few grows you will know just how much to leave so don't overdue it, if you under due it at least you will definitively know at the end you made a mistake, if you over trim, it wont be so obvious and defining that magic density point will be much harder.
if i were you i would throw them into flowering asap, and lightly trim the bottom over the next 2 weeks, starting with the lowest growth, and gradually moving up, so that at the end of two weeks you have about 10 inches of lush, thick canopy, and no growth tips below that 10 inches.
your plans look fairly happy and healthy, i think you are gonna be very happy with your results! oh, and i'm not sure all of this stuff applies to the tomato plants i see you have in there as well lol. in the future you should try companioning with snow peas, mites love them more than pot so all your spider mites will flock to them, especially if they are the tallest plants in the room, and since you don't' have to smoke or eat them you can load them full of harsh mite poisons so those mites that leave your plants to crawl to the snow peas will die out pretty fast...
