1. Topping
2. Low Stress Training (LST)
3. Supercropping
4. Defoliation (Strategically Removing Leaves)
5. Lollipopping
6. Sea of Green (SoG)
7. Manifolding (aka Main-Lining)
8. Screen of Green (ScrOG)
9. FIMming
10. Monster Cropping

Bonus: Fluxing

Every Cannabis Grower Should Use Plant Training Techniques

As a cannabis grower, your goal is to get your plants to produce a lot of high-quality buds as efficiently as possible. A key tactic to increasing cannabis yields and bud quality is to “train” your cannabis plant when it’s young to grow wide and flat so that it produces a lot of fat top buds in the flowering stage.

The goal of all cannabis plant training techniques is to grow wide flat plants with many big top buds. Fill your grow space with top-shelf weed!

Cannabis Plant Training Benefits

• Bigger yields
• Denser buds
• Increased bud potency (higher THC)*

*In our side-by-side experiments, trained cannabis plants produce buds that have higher THC levels when tested at the lab.

Today’s cannabis plant training tutorial is all about showing you how to use free techniques to get more and better quality buds from your current setup.

Achieve better marijuana bud quality and increase THC levels with these free plant training techniques!

1.) Topping

Topping is the #1 most important, easiest, and most effective cannabis plant training technique. If you must choose only one technique, do this.

“Topping” means cutting off the growing tip (“top”) of the main stem to encourage the growth of two or more secondary stems. A grower typically “tops” the plant when it’s a few weeks old. The purpose of topping is to break the apical dominance of the cannabis plant (reduce the tendency to grow one main trunk) so it naturally grows with many branches. Topping a young cannabis plant helps encourage it to grow wide and bushy with many tops for buds to grow.

Topping means cutting off the top of a cannabis plant when it’s a few weeks old.

The result: plants naturally grow more bushy, even if you don’t do anything else.

Topped cannabis plants naturally grow wider and bushier.

The result is many tops on each marijuana plant, and each of those top stems becomes a main bud.

2.) Low Stress Training (LST)

Low Stress Training (often called “LST”) is a fancy way of saying “bending and tying down branches”. The goal of LST is to get the plant to grow in the shape you want, typically to create a more even and horizontal canopy so the plant produces many buds instead of just one. Training cannabis plants to grow flat and wide also helps deliver more light to more top buds, increasing overall yields and bud quality.

This is another technique, like topping, that can definitely be used by itself to increase yields without doing anything else.

Learn More: Low Stress Training Tutorial

Cannabis plant before low stress training.

A cannabis plant after low stress training. Branches were bent down and away from the middle of the plant, then secured with plant twisty tie.

At harvest, the cannabis plant has many big buds instead of only one. (Here’s the full grow journal)

3.) Supercropping

The main purpose of “supercropping” is to gain total control over the height of unruly cannabis plants by being able to bend even the stiffest of branches without breaking them. I’m not sure how it got its name (perhaps just because it helps make super harvests?) but the supercropping technique involves pinching and bending the stems until they break internally, but not externally. After the stem can be bent, the branches get secured where you want them to stay.

In addition to height control, supercropping causes the plant to form a knuckle at the bend point, which, as a bonus, may increase the flow of nutrients and hormones in some cases. This technique may also potentially increase the potency of buds by slightly stressing the cannabis plant in a “good” way. However, be careful to follow the tutorial to make sure you don’t accidentally break the skin and potentially kill the branch.

Learn More: How to Supercrop Plants to Control Height

Supercropping is a technique to safely bend branches at an extreme angle without “breaking the skin”. This gives you a lot more control over plant height.

4.) Defoliation (Strategically Removing Leaves)

“Defoliation” means removing fan leaves, and should be done in a strategic way to get the best results. The main goal is to remove big fan leaves that block light from reaching the bud sites early in the flowering stage. This helps the plants grow into a better structure, improves airflow, increases light penetration, and overall enhances bud development. However, this technique should be done with caution as over-defoliation can stress or stunt the plant, and works best if you follow our defoliation tutorial.

Learn more: Cannabis Flowering Stage Defoliation Tutorial

Defoliation means removing fan leaves in a strategic way during the early flowering stage. Strategic defoliation for cannabis plants is typically done on a specific schedule after flowering is initiated.

When done properly, strategic defoliation results in bigger, longer buds. In our cannabis defoliation experiment, defoliated plants also produced more THC!

5.) Lollipopping

The “lollipopping” technique involves removing the lower branches and leaves that receive little light and produce small buds. Essentially, you turn the plant into a lollipop with no leaves on the bottom. Removing the bottom leaves and bud sites that will never get light helps the plant focus its energy on the upper buds. As a result of lollipopping, the topmost buds typically grow bigger and denser.

Before and after lollipopping cannabis plants. The left plant was lollipopped, and the right plant has not been lolliopped yet.

This was done right as the grower initiated the flowering stage. Notice how all the leaves have been removed from the bottom of the plant and light now reaches the floor.

Lollipopped cannabis plants produce big buds that go deeper down into the plant. Notice how the bottom branches are bare.

Lollopopped plants tend to produce bigger and better top buds, with fewer small airy lower buds that typically are not that potent anyway.

Learn More: How to Lollipop Your Cannabis Plants

Useful Specialty Techniques

These techniques are useful in many situations, but unlike the tactics listed above (which are useful for every cannabis grower), these techniques may not be the best choice in every situation for every grower’s goals.

6.) Sea of Green (SoG)

“Sea of Green” (also known as “SoG”) is about creating a sea of buds with a bunch of little plants. Many small plants are grown together in close proximity, then forced to start flowering early. Since plants stay small, growing with the Sea of Green technique reduces the vegetative time, allowing for both quicker harvests and more harvests in a year. This technique works best for cannabis strains that have a dominant main cola, and for grow spaces where it is easy to reach all the plants including plants in the middle or back. Although Sea of Green is surprisingly efficient as far as the yields for the time and electricity used, it’s not suitable for growers with legal plant limits, and tends to take more work compared to growing fewer plants.

Learn More: How to Make a “Sea of Green” in Your Cannabis Garden

Grow many small cannabis plants for a “sea of green” and initiate the flowering stage when plants are still tiny (this size).

Each cannabis plant will grow one main bud and fill your space with weed.

7.) Manifolding (aka Main-Lining)

Originally called main-lining, this technique has come to be called “manifolding” because that is more descriptive, and also because “main-lining” has another meaning in the drug world. Manifolding involves topping the main stem multiple times when the plant is still small to create an even number of main colas that grow from a single manifold. This process creates a symmetrical and balanced plant where each main bud receives equal amounts of nutrients and light.

Note: Autoflowering strains cannot be manifolded because their vegetative stage is too short. Learn more about how to train auto-flowering cannabis strains.

The manifolding process is a neat way to learn about training cannabis plants and also ensures an excellent harvest of many big buds. In my opinion, every dedicated cannabis grower should try manifolding a photoperiod plant at least once, even if just for the experience. It’s not necessarily the most scalable or efficient plant training technique, but is definitely one of the most fun!

Manifolding is a training regimen that causes the entire plant to grow from one main “manifold”. Manifolds are fun and interesting to make!

Example of a manifolded cannabis plant at harvest.

8.) Screen of Green (ScrOG)

“Screen of Green” (often abbreviated “ScrOG” – no relation to Sea of Green technique despite the similar names) refers to using a screen or net to support and train the branches to grow flat and wide. The branches are woven through the screen as they grow, creating a flat and uniform canopy that maximizes light exposure and bud production. Creating a screen of green can be useful in some situations, but personally, I believe it’s often less work to use other techniques on this page to create wide flat plant canopies. Once a cannabis plant is woven through the screen, it’s stuck in place unless the screen also moves, which can be inconvenient. Also, if you use wire as part of the screen, it can be difficult to cut all the buds out at harvest.

Learn more: Screen of Green Tutorial

Create a screen (best to use string instead of wire to make it easy to cut away from plants at harvest).

Example of a cannabis plant growing in a screen.

(Less Useful) “Hit or Miss” Techniques

These cannabis training techniques are not consistent and should generally be avoided, or at least considered experimental.

9.) FIMming

“FIM” stands for “F*ck I Missed” 😂 Essentially, this technique is similar to topping, but instead of cutting through the main stem, a small portion of the top of the plant is left behind. FIMing was “discovered” when someone messed up while topping their plant. When done in just the right way, this can result in four or more secondary stems growing from the same node. The downside is it often doesn’t work as intended. While topping consistently splits one stem into two, FIMing can result in 1, 2, 3, or 4 final stems. If you want 4 main stems, it’s better to top the plant twice than FIM it.

FIMing means removing 80% of the top node and hoping it results in 4 main branches (inconsistent and not recommended).

10.) Monster Cropping

The “monster cropping” technique involves taking clones from a flowering plant and reverting them back to the vegetative stage (“re-vegging” the cannabis plant). A re-vegged clone often grows strangely, with multiple branches and bud sites, creating bushy and monster-like plants. Some growers think this can be an easy way to make the plant grow many buds, but in my experience, re-vegged plants grow slowly for a long time compared to seeds or regular clones. Almost any other technique on this page to make plants bushy gets faster and more consistent results.

Learn More: What is “Monster Cropping” a Cannabis Plant?

A “monster cropped” plant. Note: a cannabis grower will likely get better results with almost any other technique on this page.

Bonus: Fluxing

Similar to manifolding except more complicated and with more steps. This gets similar results as manifolding but takes more time so it’s best for growers who enjoy the process of training and experimenting with vegetative cannabis plants. Typically, you’ll get the same results for less effort by manifolding a cannabis plant instead.

Fluxing is essentially a more complex version of manifolding.

Fluxing gives similar results to other techniques on this page that take less time.

Learn More: What is “Fluxing” and How Do You Do It?

Start training your cannabis plants today using the techniques in today’s tutorial!

Grow many buds at the same time…

…and enjoy your bountiful harvest!

The post 10 Most Common Cannabis Training Terms: In Order of Usefulness appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

Do you have legal plant limits? Cannabis cultivation is legal in many countries and several states in the USA. However, many growers are subject to legal plant limits. That means they can only grow a certain number of plants at a time. For example, California (where I live) allows 21+ adults to grow up to 6 plants. In Canada, adults can legally grow up to 4 plants.

Legal plant limits? No problem! Learn how to grow up to 1 pound (~0.5 kg) of weed with 1-4 plants.

Just follow the step-by-step LST instructions and harvest a bounty of weed!

Legal plant count limits can make it harder to get big yields when growing cannabis, especially if you’re also limited on space, but there are cultivation tricks and tactics to let you harvest huge amounts of bud from small grow spaces with just a few marijuana plants. In fact, it’s possible to produce over a pound (~0.5 kg) of weed from 1-4 plants when you do it right.

Get big cannabis yields with just a few plants!

Pruning techniques like manifolding can force even one small plant to produce huge buds. This plant was less than 2 feet (0.6m) tall at harvest and produced 6.2 oz by itself.

Let marijuana plants get bigger to increase your yields. This is especially effective when combined with pruning (as explained below). These two cannabis plants are about 4 feet (1.2m) tall and produced 18.6 oz (over 1 lb) of weed between them!

This giant mass is actually made of only 4 plants trained to grow flat over a screen.

Multi-pound harvest with just 4 plants!

It’s amazing what you can accomplish with a few plants. Let’s learn how to produce a ton of weed in your marijuana garden with 1-4 plants.

1.) Grow Bigger Plants

You can only yield so much from a small plant. Bigger plants can produce a lot more weed than small plants. Just make sure you don’t let plants get too big or your space quickly gets overgrown. Growing plants to the perfect size for your setup leads to the best harvest.

In this picture: One of these clones got much bigger than the other. Although buds are similar in width, the bigger plant with longer buds produced higher yields overall. Letting a plant get big enough to completely fill your grow space can dramatically improve your final bud weights.

On average, bigger plants produce more weed.

What to do: Wait to initiate the flowering stage until plants are 1/2 the final desired size. In other words:

• Photoperiod Plants: Change to a 12/12 light schedule when plants are half size. Most strains are photoperiod strains. Plants will about double in height on average.
• Auto-flowering Plants: Auto-flowering strains start flowering on their own. Their final size depends on the strain, size of the pot, light levels, and overall care.
• Know Your Strain: Different strains “stretch” a different amount. Strains listed as “tall” strains can triple in size after buds start forming. Check the strain details when buying seeds so you know what to expect.

Cannabis plants don’t immediately stop getting bigger once they start making buds. After entering the budding/flowering stage, most plants about double in size. That means you should start 12/12 when plants are about half the final desired size.

To maximize yields, you want plants that are as big as possible without overgrowing the space. It helps to calculate how tall plants can safely get in your grow space without being too close to your grow light. No matter the height you’re going for, try to create a nice wide plant canopy. Fill the entire space under your grow light with plants.

These two plants reached half the final desired size for this grow tent. At this point, initiate the flowering stage by giving plants a 12/12 light schedule.

A few weeks later, the plants have about doubled in size. This is known as the flowering stretch. Use this knowledge to grow plants that are the right size for your grow space.

Tips to grow bigger plants

• Photoperiod strains help you control plant size – The main idea behind this step is to control the length of the vegetative stage so plants get to the optimal size. Auto-flowering strains only spend a few weeks in the vegetative stage, and therefore don’t give you much control over the final size. Learn more about the best strains to grow in Step 4.
• Use bigger pots – Bigger roots can support bigger plants. Plants in a small pot (under 2 gallons) tend to stay small while bigger pots (5-10 gallons) make it easier and faster to produce plants that are 3+ feet (1+ m) tall.
• Consider coco or hydro – Plants grown in hydroponics (and to a lesser extent coco) tend to grow faster than soil plants. If you want to get big plants fast, hydro or coco may be a good way to go. Soil or super soil can still be great choices, but they may add to the total time to harvest.
• Grow plants to 1/2 size before flowering – Initiate the flowering stage when plants are 1/2 the final desired size. This is done by using a timer to put grow lights on a 12/12 light schedule. On average, plants double in size after the switch to 12/12, though strains listed as “tall” or “short” may stretch more or less. Learn more about the flowering stretch.
• Total plant coverage – Completely fill your space before you initiate the flowering stage. Think of sculpting a plant canopy that is wide and flat like a table…

2.) Train Plants to Grow Flat

You just learned about good plant coverage. This step takes that to the next level. In addition to making sure your entire grow area is filled with plants, you increase yields even more by training them to grow wide and flat (like a table) before you initiate the flowering stage.

While plants are in the vegetative stage, bend branches down and tie them in place to maintain as flat and wide a canopy as possible. Try to make plants shaped like a table.

Why do growers train plants to grow flat? The biggest buds grow at the top of a cannabis plant, close to the grow light, Buds that are lower on the plant, or further from the light, tend to stay small. A flat canopy means you get many buds the perfect distance away. This ensures your plant grows tons of buds, and every single bud swells to a big size.

Main Idea: Train plants to grow flat and wide like a table in the vegetative stage.

Tips to grow wide, flat plants.

• Cut off the top of young plants – Cut off the top of young plants in the vegetative stage. Cutting off the top of a plant is often called “topping” in the cannabis growing world. Topping splits any stem into two, and a plant with two tops is easier to spread out to create flat plants than a plant with one main top
  • Beginner tip: Wait until the seedling has grown 6 sets of leaves. Cut off the top through the main stem above the 5th set of leaves (pictures below). Easy and simple, yet won’t stress plants. After being topped, your plant is easier to spread out and naturally grows more bushy and wide.
• Tall stems should also be “topped” – Cut off the ends of any stem that’s growing much faster than the rest. Each new pair of stems grows slower than the original one. Topping is a great tool to curb fast-growing stems in the vegetative stage.
• Spread out – As the plant grows, spread out the stems by bending them down and away from the center of the plant. Don’t forget to tie branches down with something like plant twist tie or they’ll spring right back up the next day!
• Supercrop (if necessary) – Cannabis stems get hard and woody as time goes on. If you find you need to bend a stem that’s already stiff, use the supercropping technique to bend even the toughest stems at any angle. This is a bit advanced because you can accidentally split stems. But don’t worry if you do. Simply tape broken stems back together like a cast and the plant can heal. One of the things I love about cannabis plants is it can recover if you make big mistakes in the vegetative stage.

Here’s an example of training plants to grow wide and flat for more bud sites and bigger yields.

Cut off the top of a young plant right above the 5th set of leaves (“top” the seedling above the 5th node)

When cutting through a stem, be careful not to damage the growing tips at the base of each leaf. These will become your two new stems.

Topping splits the main stem into two. You can see the two new “main stems” on each side of the cut.

Since you waited until the plant had several sets of leaves before cutting a small piece off the top, it will continue growing like nothing happened.

As the plant grows, spread out the branches and cut off the top of any stem that’s getting bigger than the others. You don’t want your plant putting too much energy into any one branch.

The plant was transplanted to a mini grow tent under an HLG 65 4000k LED grow light and given a week to adjust to the new environment.

Training time!

Bend over all the stems down and away from the center until it looks flat from the side

I used plant twist tie to hook on to each branch and tie it down where I wanted. I attached the other end to the fabric pot.

How to attach to the pot? You can use safety pins or binder clips but I think this is easier. Poke holes in the fabric using sharp pointy Fiskars pruning scissors and thread the twist tie through.

Back to training. Here’s a top view. We’re trying to fill the entire tent with this plant.

A few days later the plant has filled in nicely. Repeat the steps until you’ve filled your entire grow space.

Initiate 12/12 when plants have complete coverage at the height you want. Look at all the bud sites on this 1 plant right as it starts flowering

Here’s a side view. At this point, the only thing to do is water the plant and give it nutrients until harvest.

Partway through the flowering stage.

At harvest, this plant was just over 18″ (46 cm) tall, yet yielded several ounces because it was trained to grow wide and flat. Talk about making the most out of one small plant!

The buds started getting heavy, flattening the plant further.

Learn more about growing plants to be wide and flat.

3.) Grow Light is Key to Yields!

If you read step 1 and 2, you understand the value of plant coverage in your grow space. You’ve also learned how to produce plants that are the perfect height and shape to maximize yields.

This step is about your grow light, which is the other most important aspect of your setup when it comes to yields.

Main Idea:  Pick a grow light that maximizes yields for your grow space.

Tips:

• Avoid fluorescent grow lights (CFLs and T5s) – If yields are a key factor for you, choose LEDs, HPS, or CMH/LEC grow lights. These are the most efficient grow lights for yields when it comes to growing cannabis. Fluorescent lights like T5s and CFLs produce excellent bud but get about half the yields per watt.
• Expect 0.5-1 gram per watt – You can use wattage to estimate yields so you pick the right grow light for your goal. With LEDs, HPS, or CMH/LEC, you can typically expect about 0.5-1 gram per watt of actual power draw. So if you’re using a 400W HPS, you could expect to yields 200-400 grams. If an LED grow light uses 300W, you could expect 150-300 grams. You can yield more or less, and some specific grow light models are better than others, but that’s a good rule of thumb for an average grower. Some modern cannabis LED grow lights like HLG or Spider Farmer LEDs can achieve 1-2 grams/watt.
• Proper grow light distance to plants – Each grow light has an optimal distance it should be kept from plants. Too close and plants will burn, too far and yields are reduced. Most grow light models list the recommended light distance in their product details. If you’re not sure, check out our tutorial on light distance.
• Good light coverage – Each grow light has an optimum amount of space it can cover (its recommended “light footprint”). If light doesn’t reach your plants on the edges, those plants will produce poor yields For example, if you have a 2’x3′ (or 0.5mx1m) grow space, get a light that’s made for that size space. Luckily, this is another detail that’s usually listed in the description when you buy a grow light.

Maximize yields with the right grow light for your space

A great LED grow light produces a ton of weed with just a few plants.

Check out examples of yields to expect for 3 popular cannabis grow lights I recommend for indoor growers.

Set and Go – 100W Quantum Board (LED Grow Light)

• Grow space: 2’x2′ grow space
• Heat: Fixture gets hot but will not warm up the room
• Average Yields – 1.5 – 3.5 ounces
• Bud Quality: Potent and pretty with great effects, but buds may be airy
• Recommended model: HLG 100 LED Grow Light
  • 4000k version is best for seedlings, clones, and the vegetative stage
  • 3000k version is best for the flowering stage
  • both work from seed to harvest, but 3000k produces higher yields
• See an example setup with this grow light

If you want to start small, this light lets you hang up .a grow light and start growing decent amounts of high-quality weed in a small space. Flimsy but effective. It barely affects the electricity bill and doesn’t make much heat. Also an excellent choice for seedlings and clones.

HLG 100 should be kept about 10″ away from the tops of plants

3 plants grown with the HLG 100 using the techniques above – 5.5 oz

Great Yields Without Much Heat – 300W Quantum Board (LED Grow Light)

• Grow space: 2’x4′ or 3’x3′ grow space
• Heat: Warms up a room by a few degrees
• Average Yields – 5-10+ ounces
• Bud Quality- Dense, potent, sparkly nugs
• Recommended models: Mars Hydro SP3000 LED (2’x4′ space) or Mars Hydro FC-E3000 (3’x3′ space)
• See an example setup (with detailed yield estimates) for 2’x4′ space or 3’x3′ space.

For this size grow light, I’ve had really great results with Mars Hydro grow lights. They’re easy to use, powerful with big yields in the flowering stage, yet surprisingly gentle on young cannabis plants.

3 plants grown under a 300W LED grow light using the techniques listed above – 11.1 oz

Big Producer – 315W CMH (sometimes called LEC)

• Grow space: 3’x3′ grow space
• Heat: Burning hot bulb raises the temperature of a room by several degrees
• Average Yields: 5-12 ounces (though I’ve yielded over a pound before)
• Recommended Model: Sun System Flower Power 315W LEC/CMH
• Bud Quality – Intense smells and unbelievable trichome production (get the most glitter by using the 4200k Philips or 4100k Eye Hortilux bulb in the flowering stage)
• See an example setup with a 315 CMH.

4 plants grown under a 315 LEC grow light using the above techniques – 12.57 oz

4.) Choose the Right Genetics (plus example strains)

If yields are a consideration, pay close attention to genetics. You can greatly increase yields by choosing a strain that is known to yield more than average.

• Photoperiod strains only – To follow this tutorial, you need to be able to control the length of the vegetative stage. Photoperiod plants give you total control because they won’t start flowering until you initiate a 12/12 light schedule. Most cannabis strains are photoperiod strains, so unless you buy “auto-flowering” seeds, you’re good to go.
• High-yielding – Some strains can yield 2-3x as much as other strains in the exact same grow space and conditions. It’s astounding how big of a difference genetics makes to yields.
• Avoid “short” strains – Short strains tend to yield less because plants are smaller.

Example cannabis strains that are heavy-yielders:

• Kushberry Moonrocks – ultra potent, purple, sparkly buds
• White Widow – high-yield version of the classic strain
• Fruity Pebbles – smells sweet and fruity
• Royal Gorilla – easy to grow, top-shelf buds
• Planet of the Grapes – some of the best yields of any strain I’ve grown.
• Thug Roze R1 – massive yields, tangy ‘Sativa’ smell that’s rare these day, unique effects.
• Dos Si Dos 33 (Barney’s Farm version) – huge yields, excellent buds, easy to grow.
• THC Bomb (MSNL version) – massive yields, excellent buds, developed by a geneticist

A single White Widow cannabis plant produced 12.57 oz of dense buds under 300W.

Many branches produced over an ounce of weed after being dried, and every bud was rock hard.

5.) Advanced Techniques

If you only follow the steps above, you can produce bountiful yields with just a few plants. But some growers want to maximize their yields even more. In that case, this section is for you.

These techniques require a bit more work and know-how, but they can produce incredibly high yielding plants indoors.

• ScrOG (Screen of Green)
• Manifolding or Fluxing

ScrOG (screen of green) means using a screen or netting to train plants to grow flat before flowering.

Manifolding or Fluxing are similar techniques with the goal of creating plants where all the branches meet at one part of a plant (the “manifold”). These techniques require extra time in the vegetative stage, but reward you with huge symmetrical buds. Plus these techniques are super fun!

With manifolding or fluxing, young plants are cut up in the vegetative stage so that all branches come from one main “manifold” on the main stem.

The base of a “manifolded” plant

Fluxing is a different take on manifolding, but follows the same essential principles of splitting the main stem and creating a symmetrical plant structure

When followed step-by-step, these techniques produce outstanding harvests on every plant

A grower named “nugbuckets” designed and popularized the manifolding technique (though he called it “main-lining” at the time) to maximize yields per plant. Here’s one of the manifolded plants from his original tutorial. A huge thank you to nugbuckets for sharing your knowledge with the home growing community!

Now you are armed with the knowledge to produce tons of marijuana even if you have plant limits. It’s time to grow the yields you want!

GrowWeedEasy.com has hundreds and hundreds of pages!

Check out some articles you may not have seen…

• Nebula’s Manifold – Cannabis “Main-Lining”  – Turn your cannabis plants into a lean, mean, organized green producing machine! The technique is pretty keen if you know what I mean.
• How Long Does It Take to Grow Weed Indoors? – When we first started growing, we asked this question so many times only to get generic, non-specific answers. That won’t happen here! We only deal in details!
• Stealth Growing: How to NOT get Caught Growing Weed – Despite the ever-increasing legality of growing your own cannabis, it’s still be best to be on the safe side and remain as stealthy as possible. Even if it’s legal where you are, theives know that the police won’t investigate cannabis plant theft…
• How to Save Money When Growing Weed – When you grow your own weed, you should experience an increase in quality, but it should also cost drastically less than purchasing froma dispensary. If your weed isn’t dirt cheap (yet), let us help you get there!

The post How to Produce a Ton of Weed with Only 1-4 Plants appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

GrowWeedEasy.com teaches you the secrets of cannabis home grow.

• Start Here: How to grow weed
• Get Seeds: Safe seed sources
• Sick Plants? See the plant doctor
• When to Harvest? Harvest guide

Get cannabis seeds at Seed Supreme or see our full list of our favorite cannabis seed banks.

Growing weed is easy when you know what to do, but most “how to grow marijuana” tutorials leave you feeling like you need a degree in horticulture.

GrowWeedEasy.com only contains useful cannabis grow tips, tactics, and lessons from actual home growers with years of growing experience.

Even a total beginner can consistently produce top-shelf weed by following our step-by-step home grow tutorials. 100% written by humans who care.

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Grow Weed Easy.com was started in 2010 by home growers Nebula Haze and Sirius Fourside. Together, we built a free online “encyclopedia of cannabis home grow” with 650+ expert home cannabis cultivation tutorials about every aspect of growing weed.

GrowWeedEasy.com is now the biggest and most comprehensive source of free home grow information in the world.  We show you how easy it is to grow your own marijuana at home.

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Our Goal: You grow as much top-shelf weed as possible, with as little time and effort needed to grow your desired yields and cannabis bud quality.

Whether you’re a total beginner who wants to start growing cannabis indoors for the first time, or an experienced grower who wants to upgrade your skills to Pro level, this website was built for you.

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If you want dense, beautiful, great-smelling weed, our new digital book gives you our complete harvest system. Follow the straightforward instructions and massively upgrade your next harvest. A few small changes can make a huge difference to your results.

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If you’re reading this right now, you want to grow great cannabis at home.

Cannabis plants isn’t a regular house plant, but learning how to grow isn’t as complicated growers make it seem. We’ve spent the last 16 years breaking down the home grow process so anyone can learn it.

The key to consistent harvest results is simple: follow a proven system developed for home growers.

You could waste an entire grow learning through trial and error…

Or take the shortcut and harvest a sea of fat, dense, beautiful buds that smell great. At home!

Follow our 5-week course and get walked through each part step-by-step. Build by experienced home growers and honed with hundreds of students since 2019, we ensure you achieve great results on your very next harvest.

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You may be asking yourself these common growing questions:

“How do I grow marijuana indoors?”

Read this guide on how to grow marijuana indoors. Or check out this article to learn what materials you need to get started growing your own marijuana!

Luckily, it’s really easy to get a cannabis seed to sprout!

“How much money will it cost to get started?”

If you’re considering growing weed, it costs as little as $300 to get started growing or a bit more for a semi-automatic, high-yielding bubbleponics grow system. See examples of yields to expect, electricity use & startup costs for different setups. Read this article to see even more growing styles with different price ranges.

“Where can I get marijuana seeds?”

Check out our How to Buy Marijuana Seeds Online Guide (with delivery to every state of the USA) to safely get your hands on good genetics. Starting with good seeds lets you choose the looks, smell, and effects of your buds!

Learn where it’s safe to buy cannabis seeds online (2026 update).

What do good cannabis seeds look like?

Learn about the best marijuana beginner strains and how to research and find the right strain.

Cannabis buds are generally green, but can also be pink or purple with certain strains.

“How much will electricity cost each month?”

If you’re just growing a few marijuana plants for personal use, it will cost you $20-$100+/month for electricity, depending on what grow lights (electricity) and nutrients you use. On average, I’d say a hobby-size grower might pay about $50/month to grow, but it depends greatly on your setup and local electricity costs! How much will electricity cost each month?

“How can I increase my marijuana yields?”

We have quite a few techniques to choose from or combine! See some of our most popular pages:

• Super Cropping – A simple technique to bigger yields
• Simplest Guide to Growing Short & Bushy Marijuana Plants
• LST (Low Stress Training) – Training your plants can easily double your harvest!
• Or check out our page on the controversial defoliation technique

Even More Ways to Increase Cannabis Yields

1. Increase Light Intensity (plus choose right light for desired yields & possibly add CO2)
2. Manipulate How Plants Grow (a free way to yield more bud indoors)
3. Provide Right Nutrients (low Nitrogen in the flowering stage, and remember sometimes less is more!)
4. Control Growing Environment (let the growing environment work for you)
5. Harvest Plants Properly (most importantly, don’t harvest early!)
6. Lastly, it’s important to remember that the strain has a major effect on yields!

Two small cannabis plants can yield several ounces of premium weed!

“How can I grow weed privately?”

Read guide on growing weed indoors without anyone knowing. But remember the most important factors to stealth growing: “No tell, no smell, no sell.” Never tell anyone, not even your best friend, that you’re growing. Be on top of preventing smells, and never ever sell cannabis. Breaking one of those 3 principles is how 99% of growers get found out!

“What if my plants get sick?”

The most common issue a grower runs into is a pH imbalance. Barring that, your marijuana plants likely either have a nutrient deficiency, heat or light stress, or are being attacked by some sort of marijuana mold, pest or bug. Whether you call it weed, cannabis, sinsemilla, skunk, pot, marijuana, or something else, the plant known as Cannabis Sativa is a hardy weed in the wild and can actually be easy to grow indoors at home when you know what to do.

Growing Medical Marijuana

“Medical marijuana” has become a household name. The body of evidence for medical marijuana in the treatment of cancer and other illnesses is growing every day. And for those who need medical marijuana, growing weed indoors is the perfect way to ensure a safe, regular supply of buds, for cheap.

In fact, when you grow weed indoors for personal use, you often end up with way too much. If you catch the growing bug like I did, and if you start enjoying the process of tending your cannabis garden just for the sake of gardening, you’re going to have to find a way to press, cook, freeze, and concentrate all your extra buds. 🙂

As you probably know, both medical marijuana and recreational cannabis have been decriminalized or legalized in many places around the world and weed is becoming legal in more places every day! Yet there still aren’t many simple indoor “how to grow weed” guides for beginners (even for those who legally grow, such as medical marijuana users and those who live in places where marijuana is legalized for personal use).

If so, I know how you feel. It can be hard to weed out all the bad information on the internet and find well-researched, free tips or instructions on how to grow your own cannabis. That’s why Grow Weed Easy.com aims to be a simple online resource that explains from start to finish what you need to do when growing cannabis so you can learn how to grow cannabis with great yields and potent buds, even if you only have a small grow space like a closet or even a computer case.

We’ve grown cannabis out of closets and have gotten ounces of buds and you can too. Grow Weed Easy.com covers many popular cannabis cultivation topics, including:

• A comparison between different cannabis grow lights including experience-based information about LED grow lights
• A page that teaches you the basics of how to grow weed
• Detailed how-to weed growing tutorials
• How to start growing weed tomorrow  (simplest cannabis growing guide!)
• Grow 4 oz with a 100W LED <– An Easy Way to Start Growing!
• Our famous grow guide that teaches you how to grow weed using bubbleponics (hydro).

Start Growing Weed Today!

Grow Weed Easy is run by a panel of experienced cannabis growers, including the founders Nebula Haze and Sirius Fourside, who originally teamed together to bring you GrowWeedEasy.com. Due to the demand for more marijuana growing information, we’ve also started an inbox magazine all about how to grow weed, with additional tutorials, tips, and tactics sent to you each week. Simply sign up to start getting free expert growing articles delivered to you! All the information available at GrowWeedEasy.com is completely free and we regularly update the site and make new additions.

Looking for a growing book?

If you are interested in doing a bit of reading or would like to know more about the science behind marijuana hydroponics or horticulture, I strongly recommend viewing our page of Marijuana Grow Book Reviews. Read reviews of marijuana grow books. We would love to hear about your experiences with growing cannabis. Whether you are a pro grower already or are just starting your first plant, we have learned so much from our readers both beginners and masters! If you have any suggestions, comments, concerns, or just want to ask some questions about your marijuana grow, please contact us!

Happy Growing!
Nebula Haze & Sirius Fourside

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The post Grow Weed Easy – Learn How to Grow Cannabis Tutorials appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Most Common Plant Training Mistakes

1. Not Training at All
2. Breaking a Main Stem by Accident
3. Mistakenly Keeping Plants Too Small
4. Letting Plants Get Too Big
5. Topping Plant Too Early (or Incorrectly)
6. Not Securing Plants Properly
7. Excessive Training on Sick or Slow-Growing Plants

Did you know that “training” your cannabis plants to grow many main bud sites (instead of just one) is a simple and free way to get bigger yields indoors? Plant training can increase indoor yields by 40% or more (compared to letting plants grow naturally) by forcing plants to grow bigger, denser buds, without as many smaller or airy ones.

In the vegetative stage, marijuana plants are trained to grow wide and flat, like a table

In the flowering stage, this shape ensures that many bud sites develop into long, thick colas by taking advantage of the fact that cannabis plants put the most energy into buds that are both at the top of the plant and close to the grow light.

Although plant training can produce impressive results, sometimes marijuana growers aren’t given the right information, which can cause unfortunate mistakes that hurt their yields!

With that in mind, I will cover the 7 most common marijuana plant training mistakes, so you get the yields results you want every time, even if it’s your first time!

1.) Not Training at All

In our growing forum, when I asked what people’s biggest mistakes were when it came to training their cannabis plants, the most common answer was actually growers regretted not training their plants at all!

It’s true that you can get great results without any plant training, but training techniques can significantly improve your yields compared to letting the plant grow into its natural shape. Plant training can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be, but even a little bit of effort in your plant’s early life can make a big difference to your final bud weight!

The trained plant on the right had many more main colas and produced far more bud than the untrained plant on the left, even though it took up less space

2.) Breaking a Main Stem by Accident

It’s important to use bending techniques from the beginning of a plant’s life because stems start getting stiff as they get older. Starting while the plant is still young makes the whole process go much more easily!

However, even if you’re careful, it can be easy to snap a stem by accident. This most often happens when trying to forcefully bend an older stem that has become thick and unyielding.

Nothing is better than bending when stems are flexible to get your plants to grow exactly how you want, but there are a few techniques that can help you bend over stems after they’ve already hardened!

Prevent broken stems by bending at the newest growth if possible, where stems are more flexible.

Supercropping (Advanced) – If a stem feels too stiff but it must be bent, don’t force it! Use a technique called “supercropping” to soften up the inside first, so the skin doesn’t break.

1. Pinch the stem tightly between your fingers at the place you want it to bend
2. Start gently wiggling the stem back and forth while also trying to crush the new joint in between your fingers.
3. Wiggle back and forth for 10+ seconds, or until the stem has greatly loosened up at the place you want to bend.
4. Once the stem feels loose and flexible at the joint, you’re safe to bend it over and secure it in place. This can even work with thicker stems if you’re patient enough to wiggle for a while!

Learn More About Supercropping

If you do end up breaking a main stem, you can often tape up the injury like a cast and the plant will heal itself over the next week or two.

Remember: If you do break off a main stem early in a plant’s life, it’s no big deal because there are usually dozens more growth tips to take its place! And even if you break off a main stem/cola during the flowering stage and can’t tape it up in time, it can help to remember that most growers lose a cola at some point!

3.) Mistakenly Keeping Plants Too Small

A very small plant just can’t make as much bud as a bigger plant, so keeping plants smaller than needed can reduce your yields. You will get the best yields by growing your plants so that they fill up your grow space.

Since this plant was kept so small before it started flowering, it just doesn’t have the size or infrastructure to support a lot of buds. There’s nothing a grower can do at this point to get a plant like this to yield a lot of bud. It’s important to avoid mistakenly keeping plants too small before they start making buds!

It’s important to wait until a plant is at least 3-4 weeks old before initiating the flowering stage (putting cannabis plants on a 12/12 light schedule), even if you’re trying to get to harvest as fast as possible.

This is because a plant won’t start flowering before about week 3-4 anyway, so giving plants a 12/12 light schedule before that time just reduces the total amount of light they get each day, and they won’t get as big as plants under 18/6 or a 24/0 schedule from seed.

3-4 Week Old Plant – Never switch to 12/12 earlier than this or plants will stay tiny, and waiting a few more weeks is probably better!

This plant was switched to flowering when it was 4 weeks old, and yielded about an ounce in one big cola.

Some growers recommend you wait until 6 weeks to start flowering. One reason is that cannabis plants tend to mature the fastest if they have already started showing “pre-flowers” (tiny versions of adult flowers) before initiating the flowering stage.

But the main reason is that letting the plants go just a little bit longer – to about week 6 – will give you plants that are significantly bigger and which can support bigger buds.

6-Week Old Plant That’s Been Trained to Grow Flat

After being switched to 12/12 immediately after the above picture, the plant turned into this, yielding about 6 ounces on the single plant. Two extra weeks in the vegetative stage can make a huge difference in plant size!

Note: These rules don’t apply to auto-flowering plants, which will automatically start flowering on their own without any input from you. If you want a very small plant that yields a lot, consider auto-flowering strains: they’re ready to harvest about 3 months from germination and stay small on their own! Overall, it’s much better than doing 12/12 from seed.

4.) Letting Plants Get Too Big

As we just covered, if you have the space/height for it, you’ll get better yields for your electricity by giving the plant time to get to a decent size before switching to the flowering stage.

However, if you let a plant get too big during the vegetative stage, it may completely overgrow your space!

Look at how this plant has already grown into the grow lights in the vegetative stage! This is a problem because the lights can’t be lifted up any higher in this particular grow space, and the plant is going to double in height after the switch to 12/12! This kind of crazy overgrowth can happen before you know it if you have a fast-growing plant, so stay aware of how big your plant is getting!

If plants are allowed to get too big during the vegetative stage, you’ll not only end up wasting time and electricity, you’ll also find yourself with an overcrowded grow space. Plants being too close to each other and the grow lights can cause light burn, white powdery mildew, bud rot, and other unwanted problems.

Flowering Stretch: It’s important to remember that plants often double in height (known as the “flowering stretch”) after the switch to the flowering stage, so it’s important to change to 12/12 around the time the plants have reached half the final desired height.

Pre-Stretch – Right before the switch to 12/12

Post-Stretch – 4 weeks after the switch to 12/12. Notice how much taller they got!

Learn more about the flowering stretch!

If you have a plant that’s been growing incredibly tall and lanky, with a lot of upward growth without as much side branching, consider that a plant like that may stretch up to three times its height after the switch to 12/12. A plant that tends to grow short and bushy its whole life may not stretch much at all.

Different strains will stretch a different amount after the switch to 12/12. The main clue is what the breeder says about the strain, as well as how the plant tended to grow in the vegetative stage (lanky vegetative plants often become lanky adults).

5.) Topping Plant Early or Incorrectly

Removing the top of the main stem (“topping” the plant) before it has grown at least 3-4 nodes often wastes more time than it saves.

In fact, removing any part of the plant when it’s very young can stunt the plant, meaning it may grow slowly or stop growing altogether for days or even weeks.

However, if you wait until a plant is healthy and growing fast with a good root system, it won’t even slow down after being topped! Waiting until the plant is the right size often improves your overall results from topping.

These young cannabis plants are ready to be topped

If you cut off just the very tip of your plant, there’s very little chance of stunting, even if it only has 3 or 4 nodes in total.

Many growers top down to the 3rd node/pair of leaves (like in the following picture) in order to form a short manifold. If you plan on any kind of extensive training like building a manifold, wait until the young plant has grown at least 6 nodes before starting; this ensures it has established a good root system. The more of the plant you remove at a time, the more it stresses the plant, so you want to make sure your plant is mature/strong enough to handle it!

Be careful not to damage the growth tips during topping. These tiny stems will become your new main colas, and the base of every growth tip is where buds form.

Always leave a little extra stem when topping a marijuana plant – this helps prevent the main stalk from splitting!

6.) Not Securing Your Plant Properly!

Don’t use string or anything “sharp” to secure plants, as it can start cutting into their skin over time! Also, it’s important to make sure that you can easily access all your plants after training.

Never use string to hold down your plants!

Notice how this plant can’t be moved from its location because it’s attached to a nearby wall? Don’t do this! Always attach your plant directly to the pot so you can pick it up and move it. Also, avoid using something sharp like string or chicken wire to hold down the plants, because it will slowly cut into the plant’s “skin” over time and cause damage.

Plant twist ties are perfect for securing plants! They bend into the shape you want, and are soft enough they won’t hurt plants.

Or get creative! Any type of soft flexible wire works well

Make sure to attach any twisty ties directly to the plant container; this lets you pick up and move the plant freely!

As the plant grows, whenever some of the colas are getting taller than the others…

Bend the tallest ones over until they’re all the same height as each other. Following just that one principle will produce the shape you’re looking for!

7.) Excessive Training on Sick or Slow-Growing Plants

When a cannabis plant is slow-growing or suffering from deficiencies, it is much more sensitive to stress from training. Things like topping, supercropping and extreme defoliation can all aggravate a sick plant and make it take longer to recover.

If you have a sick or slow-growing plant it’s good to give them a few days of TLC before you commence training 🙂

Always let sick plants recover before extensive training. This plant suffered from a grower accidentally giving 3x the correct amount of nutrients. It’s important to wait until it’s healthy and growing new leaves every day before doing anything else to this poor plant!

What can you do to help a cannabis plant relax for a few days?

Help plants recover quickly by moving the grow light a few inches away, and leaving the plant alone on an 18/6 light schedule (if it’s in the vegetative stage, of course, if you have a plant on a 12/12 light schedule you don’t want to change it!).

Providing relatively low levels of light in a comfortable, temperate environment without any disturbance can help a stressed plant regain its strength and start growing fast again in just a day or two. Once your plant is healthy and growing again, put the lights back on at full strength!

How far away should I keep my grow lights?

After extensive wilting from a heat spell, the grower of the plant below thought his baby was a goner. He tossed the dying plant in a bucket at the edge of his grow room, with the plan of throwing it in the garbage later that day. He somehow forgot, and a few days later he came back to find out that the comfortable temperature outside the grow tent and filtered light levels from a nearby window had been just the thing to bring the plant back to life! Even with just an inch of water at the bottom of the bucket, the plant was thriving!

Check out that plant at harvest!

At a recent growing convention in San Diego I heard from another grower who’d noticed that lowering the light levels just a tiny bit can help a sick plant recover more quickly. The worst thing you can do for a sick plant is turn up the light, because it makes the plant work harder to keep up with all that photosynthesis!

I thought a cannabis plant could come back from anything?

When people say, “It grows like a weed” and explain how cannabis plants can recover from anything, they’re talking about a healthy, fast-growing plant. You really can do almost anything to a vibrant cannabis plant in the vegetative stage and it’ll bounce right back!

For growers who always have healthy plants, it can seem like plants simply can’t get stunted. But if you take the same approach with a sick, sparse or slow-growing plant, it can dramatically slow down the plant’s growth for days or even weeks in rare cases!

Now is not the time to train this plant (or try anything new really). Wait until it has recovered first, then start training!

Whenever you’re thinking about training or removing parts of the plant, always consider the plant’s overall health first. You’ll know when you would be better served by waiting a few days to start training.

Now that you know how to prevent the 7 most common plant training problems that hurt yields…

Time to start training your plants!

Jump to….

How Many Plants Should I Grow?

7 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I First Started Growing Weed

Why Are Cannabis Leaves Turning Yellow?

7 Tips to Improving Bud Quality

The post 7 Unfortunate Plant Training Mistakes appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

In addition to the search bar, this link guide helps you navigate through the Grow Weed Easy website. Learn about growing topics you won’t find anywhere else! This is a shortened list of all our cannabis growing tutorials, as the website has over 500 articles and tutorials!

Full List of EVERYTHING on GWE  ← Over 500 Articles & Growing Tutorials!

Start Here – Beginner Grow Guides

• Complete Beginner’s Guide
• How do I start growing my own weed indoors? (get help choosing your setup)
• How to Grow Weed in 10 Steps
• Simplest Cannabis Grow Guide Ever!
• How Long Does It Take to Grow Weed? (Marijuana Growth Timeline)
• 3 Steps from Beginner to Legendary Grower
• Complete New Grower’s Shopping List

Cannabis Life Stages

• Germination
• Vegetative Stage (Getting Bigger)
• Flowering Stage (Making Buds)
• Harvest

Choosing…

• Best Type of Nutrients
• Choosing the Best Grow Light
• Soil vs Hydro
• How Many Plants Should I Grow?
• What Part of the House Should I Grow In?
• What Setup Should I Get?
• Best Strains for Beginners
• Where to Get Seeds (including the U.S.)

Common New Grower Topics

• How Much Will Electricity Cost?
• Stealth Growing: How NOT to Get Caught Growing Weed
• What Equipment Do I Need?
• Germinate Your Seeds
• 7 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I First Started Growing Weed
• How to Save Money When Growing Weed
• How to Store Weed Properly (so it never loses smell or potency!)
• Ask Questions & Get Answers From Real Growers! (In Our Free Growing Community)
• Cannabis Grower’s Glossary

Problems & Symptoms

• Cannabis Problems Guide
  • How to Help Yellow Seedlings
  • How to Fix Yellow Cannabis Leaves
  • How to Fix Curling and Clawing Cannabis Leaves
  • What Causes Dry or Crispy Leaves?
  • What Causes Brown Spots on Cannabis Leaves?
  • What Causes Bananas (“Nanners”) on Cannabis Buds?
  • Is This Nutrient Burn on My Marijuana Plant?
  • What causes red stems in cannabis plants?
• Diagnose Your Sick Plant
• Bugs & Other Cannabis Pests
• How to Prevent Nutrient Deficiencies
  • Which Nutrient Deficiencies are Caused by pH? (picture guide)
  • How to Stop Flowering Stage Nutrient Deficiencies
• 7 Reasons Why Cannabis Plants Grow Slow
• 5-Step Remedy That Fixes 99% of Grow Problems
• All-Natural Pesticides – Safe Up to Harvest!

Plant Training (Indoor Tricks for Bigger Yields)

• Simplest Plant Training Guide Ever!
• How to Control Height of Indoor Cannabis Plants
• Complete Plant Training Guide
• Breakdown of Techniques​
  • Low Stress Training (LST) Tutorial
  • Topping vs FIMing Tutorial
  • LBH’s Famous ScrOG Tutorial
  • Supercropping: Magic Technique to Control Cannabis Plant Height
  • Sea of Green (SoG) Tutorial
  • 12-12 from Seed – Flowering Plants Early
  • Nebula’s Manifold Tutorial
  • How to Manifold Clones
  • Nebula’s Bud-Based Defoliation Tutorial
  • Alternate Defoliation Tutorial ​
  • What is Re-Vegging / Monstercropping?
• How Can I Train an Auto-Flowering Plant?
• 7 Unfortunate Plant Training Mistakes

Grow Mediums

• What’s the Best Growing Medium?
• Soil vs Coco vs Hydro
• Basic Soil Guide
• Organic Soil Compost Guide (Super Soil) – Just Add Water!
• Coco Coir Guide
  • Coco Coir: The Most Flexible Cannabis Grow Medium
• Hydro/DWC/Bubbleponics Guide
• “True” Organic Growing vs Just Using Organic Nutrients
• Can You Use Miracle-Gro?

Nutrients

• Which Nutrients Are Best For Growing Cannabis?
• Soil Nutrients
• Coco Coir Nutrients
• Hydroponic Nutrients

Grow Lights

• 5 Best LED Grow Lights 2025 (Yields, Speed, & Bud Quality)
• Compare Types of Cannabis Grow Lights
  • Fluorescents (T5s) – Good for Seedlings Only (not powerful enough to produce potent buds or big yields)
  • CFLs (Spiral Bulbs) – Not Recommended (LEDs are much better)
  • LED Grow Lights – Recommended for Most Home Growers
  • MH/HPS Grow Lights – Good Alternative to LEDs, But Run Much Hotter
  • CMH / LEC Grow Lights – Good Alternative to LEDs, But Run Much Hotter
  • Plasma / Magnetic Induction Grow Lights – Not Recommended (poor cannabis growth)
• How Does Light Spectrum Affect Marijuana Plants?
• How Far Away Do I Keep My Grow Lights?
• You Can Actually Give Plants Too Much Light?!
• Grow Light Upgrade Guide: Yields & Potency Explained
• Cannabis Grow Lights: What’s the Best Size?

Best LED Grow Light Articles

• 5 Best LED Grow Lights 2025 (Yields, Speed, & Bud Quality)
• LED Grow Lights: Too Much or Not Enough Light?
• LED Grow Journal: Mars Hydro TSL-2000W vs Spider Farmer SF-2000
• LEC vs LED Grow Lights: Side-by-Side Cannabis Grow Journal
• Nebula’s Auto-Flowering Grow Journal (Topping vs Natural) – cannabis plants are grown under LED grow lights

Environment

• Create the Perfect Growing Environment
  • Temperature Tutorial
  • 5 Secrets to Heat Control
  • Control Humidity for Better Buds
  • How to Use Reflective Walls to Increase Yields Indoors
  • How to Make Plants Grow Faster with CO2
• Where’s the Best Place in the House to Grow Your Plants?
• How to Control Odors
• How to Set Up an Exhaust
• How to Set Up a Grow Tent for Better Yields (and Stealth)

Plant Care Tutorials

• Cloning
  • How to clone weed in a cup of water (easy!)
  • How to make cannabis clones with an aero cloner
• Intro to Plant Training for Bigger Yields Indoors
• How Often to Water Plants
  • The Easiest Way to Water Plants & Remove Runoff
• How (and When) to Transplant Cannabis
• Male vs Female Plants
• When to Harvest?
• Drying & Curing

How to Improve…

• Yields
• Bud Quality
  • 7 Environment Effects on Bud Quality
  • The Secret to Excellent Bud Quality
• THC Levels
• CBD Levels
• Smell/Taste
• Density
• Bud Color (How to Grow Pink or Purple Buds)
• Glitter (Make Buds Sparkle with More Trichomes)
• Bonus: What Determines Yields?

Buying Seeds

• Where to Get Seeds
• How to Find the Right Strain
• What are “Feminized” Seeds?
• Which Breeders to Trust?
• Photoperiod vs Auto-Flowering Cannabis Strains
• Bag Seed vs Hype Seed: Is it worth it to buy cannabis seeds?

Recommended Strains

• Best Autoflowering Cannabis Strains for Yields & Potency
• List of Sugar-Dusted Strains (Heavy Trichome Genetics)
• 10 Cold-Resistant Cannabis Strains
• 14 Heat-Resistant Cannabis Strains
• Which cannabis strains stay short? (Best strains for small spaces)

Auto-Flowering Strains

• Nebula’s Guide to Cannabis Auto-Flowering Strains (Photoperiod vs Auto-Flowering)
• Should I “Top” or Train an Auto-Flowering Plant?
• What’s the best light schedule for auto-flowering strains?
• Nebula’s Auto-Flowering Grow Journal (Topping vs Natural)

Edibles

• Decarboxylation: How to Decarb Your Weed (crucial step for just about every edible recipe)
• Best Weed Butter Recipe
  • How to Make Great Brownies with Weed Butter
• Canna Caps
• How to Make Cannabis Gummies (Weed Gummy Bears)
• How to Make Cannabis Tinctures
• How to Make Hash Oil (aka Cannabis Extract Oil, Rick Simpson Oil, or RSO)

Extracts (No Solvents Used in Any Recipe)

• Solventless Extraction Showdown – Bubble Hash vs. Dry-Ice Hash!
• Dry Ice Hash (Made with Dry Ice)
• How to Make Bubble Hash (Made with Ice Water)
• How To Make Your Own Homemade Rosin (dabs)

And Lots More!

• How Long Does it Take to Grow Weed?
• Vegetative vs Flowering Stage (Long Days vs Long Nights)
• Germination & Seedling Mistakes
• Simple Guide to Plant Training
• What’s the Best Pot / Container?
• Perpetual Harvest
• What Determines Yields?
• 5 Time-Savers for Busy Growers
• Breeding Techniques
• 7 Gift Ideas for Cannabis Growers
• Grow Journals
• How long can I store nutrient water?
• What is High-Frequency Fertigation?
• Where is it legal to grow weed in the USA?
• See EVERYTHING on the Site!

Safety & Preparation

• Fire Protection in the Grow Room
• Electrical Safety Tips & Tricks
• Prepare Yourself for Growing Emergencies
• Stealth Growing Indoors: How to NOT get Caught Growing Weed

Just for Fun

• Weird or What? Cannabis Mutations & More!
• Creatures on Cannabis (Cute Photo Gallery)
• 10 Gift Ideas for Cannabis Growers

Submit Pics

• Submit Trophy Pictures of your Plants!
• How to Take Better Plant Pics
• How to Fix Yellow HPS Pics

Want More?

• Complete List of EVERYTHING on GWE  ← Full List (Over 500 articles & growing!)

Thanks for visiting! We hope our website helps you find the growing tutorials you were looking for. We’ve written hundreds of growing marijuana articles and unfortunately we can’t fit them all on this page, so we encourage you to use the search bar on the right side (or top of the page for mobile users) to search for articles you don’t see here.

Happy growing!
Nebula & Sirius

Use this “Navigation” page to find the pot growing topic you’re interested in, or click here to see every single page on the website!

The post Link Guide to Growing Cannabis Tutorials appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

What isn’t there to love about training cannabis plants? Training is fun, it gets you more involved with your plants, it helps maximize your grow space and lights, and it burns a calorie or two in addition to dramatically increasing yields!

But there is a dark side to training. It shows up when newer or possibly misinformed growers attempt to train their cannabis plants, but end up stunting their growth or generally doing them more harm than good. This can come from accidents like breaking stems, but sometimes it’s a fault in the way the technique is being used.

Today, we’re going to show you how to avoid making plant training mistakes that will slow down the growth of your cannabis. Instead, you can be sure you’re using the right technique the right way at the right time!

ScrOG Mistakes
ScrOG – short for ‘Screen of Green’ – is a method of growing cannabis where a screen is placed in between the plants and the light. The plants are kept under the screen during the vegetative stage and guided through the screen by the grower during flowering to influence neat rows of colas equally spaced from each other.

Most Common Mistakes

First Time Grower 
ScrOG can be a tough method, even for growers who’ve been doing it for a while. It isn’t just a question of knowledge, ScrOG takes much more time and physical work to keep the plants arranged the correct way. If you’re just looking into growing for the first time, I would leave the ScrOG technique for a few grows down the road.

Foul: Improper Use of ScrOG Net!
If you’re like me, you’ll see the ScrOG net in action and be hypnotized. From the outside, it looks like you set up a net and just let the plants do their thing. Unfortunately, doing ScrOG this way nullifies its benefits and will actually make for a tougher grow since there will be a useless net in the way.

When using the ScrOG net, one of the most important aspects is to keep your the plants in an even canopy and below the ScrOG net until the 2nd week of flowering (minimum). Topping will give more colas and make them easier to train under the net; topping is pretty much mandatory for ScrOG really shine.

Manifolding/Mainlining Mistakes
Manifolding (another name for the ‘Mainlining’ growing technique) is like topping taken to the extreme. Manifolding involves topping your plant three separate times for a total of 14 cuts. This is to accomplish something similar to ScrOG, but without a net; it makes for 8 colas that are spaced apart from each other in addition to being equidistant from the main stem.

Most Common Mistakes

Wrong Medium
Manifolding is a great technique and I enjoy using it personally, but it doesn’t perform the same in all mediums.

Although we learned the original Mainlining technique from Nugbuckets who was an avid organic soil grower, many growers claim it adds too much time to the vegetative period. This is due to the fact that manifolding requires a lot of recovery and growth time due to all the topping.

Hydroponic setups generally experience much faster vegetative growth than soil, so this method is much more viable in mediums like coco or DWC. In particular, plants grown in DWC, hempy buckets, or similar mediums are great at demonstrating the power of manifolding.

First Time Grower
This is another technique that can give a new grower a lot more responsibility than they expected. In addition to having to make quite a few cuts on your plant, LST is almost necessary at a vulnerable time for the plant. This means there isn’t much room for error though there is plenty of opportunity for a wrong snip or bend.

If you’ve never grown cannabis or feel apprehensive about having to top so many times, try growing a plant and top it just once. If you feel confident and/or experimental at that point, try topping the plant again or top a side branch for practice.

Topping Too Early
When growing a cannabis plant and trying a new technique, the excitement is palpable! Unfortunately for us, even fast-growing plants don’t grow fast enough to quench our gardening thirst. This can lead to ‘over-care’ (aka ‘Too Much Love’) or starting techniques prematurely.

When topping a plant for manifolding…actually, when topping a plant at all, make sure to let it grow 6 nodes before cutting anything off. You can certainly do it earlier, but topping after your plant has grown six nodes means it will be stronger and won’t need as much time to recover.

Keep the ‘Low’ In ‘Low-Stress Training’
Cannabis plants are pretty hearty, but a young plant can easily be decimated by the strength of a human, even if they’re trying to be gentle! When using LST on a cannabis plant, the difference in strength it takes to bend a stem versus breaking it is minuscule; in some cases, the breaking point is indistinguishable based on resistance alone.

This means you have to be super careful when utilizing LST on any cannabis plant, especially when they’re still young since their stems break much easier. If you’re feeling nervous when doing LST on a young plant and feel it might break soon, try splitting the LST session into multiple days. This way your plants will have a chance to recover and have a smaller chance of breakage on the next bend.

Defoliation Mistakes
Defoliation is the act of purposefully removing fan leaves from a cannabis plant to expose more nodes/bud sites to a higher amount of light. To make it short, defoliation takes back space and light taken by fan leaves and instead makes both things available for parts of the plant that can actually grow bud.

Most Common Mistakes

Defoliating Outdoors
Defoliation – amongst other things – is meant to help growers capitalize on two things in short supply: grow space and light. When it comes to growing indoors, this is a constant battle since indoor space is usually limited and grow lights give off a finite amount of light. Although a 1000W light can give MUCH more light than a plant needs, the area to which that light can reach is very limited…unlike the sun!

Defoliation is meant to help solve problems that many outdoor growers never face in the first place. If you have the room and privacy to grow in a backyard, you likely aren’t worried about how to cut down on the amount of space your plant uses. And since the sun has amazing penetration and power, there isn’t much need to try to open up the plant; it’ll grow tons of buds regardless. In short, defoliation isn’t of much use to outdoor growers.

First Time Grower
I hate to do this again, but it’s just as true with defoliation as it is with manifolding or ScrOG. If you try this on your first grow, you’re lowering the chances of success and thus you being happy with your first attempt. It’s always a good idea to tackle a grow once on easy-mode, and then try your hand at some advanced techniques.

Plucking the Wrong Leaves
Defoliation is meant to open up the plant so more light can get in. This is accomplished by removing some of the fan leaves, and the fan leaves only! Pulling sugar leaves, or growth tips can mean less bud, lost bud, and slower growth for that part of the plant.

This is a picture of a fan leaf:

Remember that this is the only type of leaf you want to remove when attempting defoliation. Also, keep in mind that the removal of leaves shouldn’t be random. Before you pluck one, try moving the leaf to the side to see if it lets light through to a growth tip or a part of the plant that could use it.

Pulling Leaves Too Early
Younger plants, especially those grown in hydroponics under a metal halide, tend to take on a shorter and bushier look than if they were grown otherwise. When you see what looks like a little shrub packed with cannabis leaves, your instinct may be to pull some, but you’ll need to make sure to factor in the age and health of the plant before moving forward.

Even if the plant looks bushy, make sure that removing leaves will actually benefit another part of the plant.

Also keep in mind that your plant should be in full-on vegetative mode, meaning that it’s growing at a pace that makes recovery easy. If you pull leaves from a plant that’s sickly, small, has only a few leaves, or is just plain bad at recovering, you’ll be waiting for days or even weeks before your plant bounces back from the procedure.

Are there pitfalls you’ve run into when trying to employ training techniques? Have you found something that has saved you time and effort and can possibly do the same for your fellow growers? Let us know!

Jump to…

LBH’s Famous ScrOG Tutorial

Nebula’s Manifold Tutorial – Main-lining Cannabis

Cannabis Defoliation: Removing Leaves to Increase Yields

Super Cropping Marijuana: Simple Secret to Bigger Yields

The post Don’t Make These Plant (Advanced) Training Mistakes! appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

Table of Contents

Intro: What is “Main-Lining” Cannabis?

Ultra-Quick Guide to Building a Manifold

• Supplies List
• Main-Lining Diagram (Easy manifold for growing weed)
• Important Concepts to Increase Success
• Step-By-Step Instructions (with pics)

Tips & Hints for an Easy Manifold

• Strain Choice
• Growing Environment
• Extra Plant Training Help

What is “Main-Lining” Cannabis?

The cannabis “main-lining” grow technique is the process of building a “manifold” on a cannabis seedling to form bigger buds and increase yields in the flowering stage. It was originally described by a talented marijuana grower named Nugbuckets who gave it the name main-lining. Nugbuckets generously gave us permission to share his easy manifolding weed growing technique on GrowWeedEasy.com.

A “manifold” means all branches come from a single point at the base of the plant. This happens when the plant’s one main stem is turned into two main stems at a young age (full instructions below).

This results is an orderly plant with multiple thick, long buds in the flowering stage. Today’s easy manifold tutorial will show you how to copy these results in your cannabis garden.

Here’s that cannabis plant at harvest with arm-sized buds.

You can barely see my hand under there.

Main-lining vs Manifolding – They are exactly the same thing, just two words for building a cannabis manifold. I call it manifolding, but many growers use the word “main-lining” since that is what Nugbuckets originally called this training technique. However, the term main-lining can mean something unsavory, so I personally choose to use the term “manifolding” when describing the technique of making a manifold.

Original example of marijuana manifolding / mainlining by Nugbuckets.

No matter what you call it, we experimented with his technique for growing cannabis indoors for several years. Over time, we slightly altered the original manifolding process by Nugbuckets. This modification increases yields and saves time (you get to harvest sooner), but at its core the idea is the same.

Example of Nebula’s Marijuana Manifold in Action by Bud (with 16 colas per plant)

A cannabis “manifold” is simply a plant where the main stem was split evenly in two when the plant was young by cutting off the top of the plant. The grower then does a few more cuts in a specific order as the young plant grows. There is nothing magical about this technique. It’s just a way to train the plant to grow, and it works well for simultaneously breaking apical dominance (tendency to grow just one main stem) while creating many big colas/bud sites without much effort.

To form the base of a “manifold,” the main stem of a young cannabis plant is split in two by cutting off the top of the plant and removing all side stems except two main ones.

When the plant is split this way, it completely destroys the “apical dominance” or the tendency of the plant to focus mostly on its one main stem. With your plant’s apical dominance broken, it tends to make many long and thick buds sites (colas), instead of just one big central bud.

After the base of the manifold has been created, the grower uses it to create several bud sites on each side. As the cannabis plant grows out, this structure results in several evenly sized main “colas” (or main stems where buds form). This is opposed to a naturally grown marijuana plant, which will usually produce just one main cola indoors.

Cannabis plants branch out heavily after being manifolded, making many main bud sites.

Indoors, the manifold technique can be used to increase your yields by giving you a “canopy” of fat buds. You will get the greatest increase in yields if you’ve had trouble in the past as far as filling your grow space with many buds. Below you can see the above plants with a cannabis manifold grown out – there are many huge buds under the grow lights instead of just one or two like with a standard cannabis plant.

When manifolded cannabis plants are allowed to get tall, they create very long thick colas

In the Nebula manifold method, we keep ALL the colas that will produce big buds. These plants still have several weeks until harvest to fatten up further.

Unlike with Nugbuckets’ original method, we keep all the big bud sites (“colas”) that reach the top of the plant. This results in bigger overall yields than just keeping the original 8 colas recommended by Nugbuckets. Another difference is that you do one less cut, which saved recovery time without lowering yields in our experiments.

The Nebula manifold method also saves you 1-2 weeks of training in the vegetative stage compared to the original technique, so you get to harvest sooner!

Because of the shorter training process, these plants made it to harvest just 4 months from seed, yielding about 11 ounces in total!

Does manifolding work on short plants? Since the Nebula manifold saves you an extra week or two in the vegetative stage, it is suitable for shorter/smaller plants than the original Nugbuckets main-lining method. If you follow the instructions in this tutorial, a cannabis plant can be effectively manifolded as long as it has room to grow at least 2 feet tall.

I trained this plant according to this tutorial and was able to harvest 6.2 ounces on a single 2 foot tall plant!

Manifolding needs to create long colas to be effective, and very short plants can’t do that. If the final plant is shorter than 2 feet, the manifold technique won’t be as good at increasing yields since you’re not playing on its strengths.

Along the same lines, a manifolded plant also needs to be grown under a powerful grow light like modern LEDs, MH/HPS bulbs or an LEC (also known as a CMH). More powerful lights means that the buds will get filled out all the way down, instead of just at the tops. Because of that, unfortunately manifolding doesn’t work well for growing short plants growing under fluorescent grow lights, but that’s what topping is made for!

This manifold tutorial gives you step-by-step instructions on the process of manifolding cannabis the Nebula way to get more buds and bigger yields. If you follow the steps and instructions exactly as written, it’s almost impossible to mess up. Think of it like a recipe, but it’s a recipe for plant training.

Why build a manifold when growing cannabis indoors?

• Big Yields – The main reason I use main-lining to build a cannabis manifold is because this training technique results in big yields from any indoor grow setup. By building a manifold in the early vegetative stage, you can get an extra 40% or more yields compared to not training your plants. I’ve used several other types of cannabis plant training techniques, and main-lining cannabis is a consistent way to get great yields every time. It takes some of the best elements of all the other techniques, and combines them into one step-by-step process that’s hard to mess up if you follow the instructions. No more guesswork.
• Simpler than Other Training Methods – Because you can follow each step word-for-word, without having to make any judgment calls of your own, it’s difficult to mess up. In this manifold tutorial, the basic idea of main-lining cannabis is to simply cut the plant a few times in a certain way, over the course of a few weeks. Then you just arrange the buds where you want using twisty tie. Each of the colas tends to grow about the same height as each other, which makes it straightforward to get a “sea of colas” that are each thick and dense, without a lot of popcorn or larfy buds. There’s nothing you have to do to make this technique work for you, or customize it to your setup.
• Less Time Spent Training – Since you just top the plant a few times and place buds, it really doesn’t take much time to get marijuana plants to become a desirable shape with lots of colas indoors. Some training methods can create similar shapes and canopies, such as ScrOG (using a net), but training plants to weave through a net can take up to an hour a night during the intense process of filling the net in the late vegetative stage. Conversely, manifolding only takes a few minutes for the first few weeks of the vegetative stage, then basically no more training is needed besides holding up heavy colas late in the flowering stage.
• Training is Over Early in the Plant’s Life – Since all the training happens in the first few weeks of the plant’s life, you’re pretty much done with training early on. Once I’ve finished my manifold, I know I’m past the “hard part” of training, and can spend the rest of my time focusing on caring for my plants, instead of getting frustrated about trying to control their shape and size.
• Less Likely to Get Bud Rot or Mold – Manifolding cannabis builds a support structure for many colas that are thick and uniform, but not overly fat. This reduces the chance of getting bud rot or other types of mold. When a cannabis plant grows naturally with one main cola/bud under very powerful grow lights, the cola can get too thick and increase the risk of developing bud rot (when the inside of the buds simply start rotting away) or developing mold during the drying and curing process. While the manifolding method produces many big thick colas, the plant spreads the energy more evenly between them so none of the colas will get to the point where the grower simply can’t maintain them properly.
• Less Time Spent Trimming – Cannabis buds need to be trimmed before they’re ready to smoke. With only long, dense colas and no airy small cannabis buds to trim, the process of trimming your buds after harvest goes by much faster than working on lots more smaller nugs. Your hands will thank you 🙂
• Buds Dry More Evenly – Since all the buds are a similar width and density, drying is a lot more straightforward. All the buds tend to be done drying at the same time.
• Impressive Bud Appearance – While big and small buds are essentially the same when it comes to potency, many growers prefer the appearance of large dense buds, which is what you’ll produce on a manifolded plant.

Manifolded cannabis buds tend to be beefy

What’s the Difference Between the “Old” Way and the “New” Way?

You can build a cannabis manifold the “old way” (the way Nugbuckets did it) and split everything completely evenly like this:

In the original technique, each main stem is the same number of “steps” from the base of the plant, which helps the plant deliver resources more easily. But in order to achieve this perfectly symmetrical shape a grower needs to cut and prune the plant 3 times, waiting a week or more in between each pruning session. That can add several weeks to the cannabis vegetative stage because each time you prune, you’re losing a lot of the growth built up by your plant.

Or… You can skip all that wasted time and build a marijuana manifold the way Nebula does it in this manifold tutorial! The Nebula manifold doesn’t look quite as even and symmetrical but will get you identical results in less time, with less wasted growth. This process is not fundamentally different in any way; it is basically the same principle but modified slightly for improved results.

In our experiments, the results are the same with a “modified” manifold, but you save time.

Even when the plant isn’t centered, the Nebula manifold technique works perfectly, it works great in most setups and with just about any plant.

Note: There are four times when it is not a good idea to manifold your cannabis:

When NOT to Manifold Your Cannabis 

1. Auto-Flowering Strains – It’s difficult to manifold auto-flowering plants because they only give you a few weeks before they start making buds. Stick to standard/photoperiod cannabis strains for the best results with manifolding.
2. Weak Grow Lights – For this technique, you want an MH/HPS, LEC, or 150W+ LED grow light. Manifolding doesn’t work well for increasing yields on plants under small grow lights with poor penetration, like fluorescent lights or small LEDs. Plants grown under smaller lights won’t get good results with manifolding, and you may even hurt their yields with all the chopping and removal of leaves and growth. Smaller grow lights don’t have the penetration to take advantage of the manifolding structure. For smaller lights, standard topping is a much more suitable technique that produces similar results.
3. Short Grow Space  – Manifolded plants need to be allowed to grow to at least two feet tall for the best results since manifolding makes long dense colas. If you don’t have that much height available for your plant to spread out in your grow space, you might consider other cannabis training methods instead, since these techniques are more suited to shorter grow spaces.
4. Unhealthy Plant – Never start main-lining a cannabis plant that isn’t already healthy and growing fast. For an unhealthy cannabis plant, the main-lining process will slow growth even more and may stunt the plant.

Nebula’s “modified” manifold technique saves an extra step (saving you 1-2 weeks of growth in the vegetative stage) compared to the manifold technique by Nugbuckets, and in our experiments the results are identical.

Here is a video of what main-lining and building a manifold can do for you.

This technique of building a manifold at the base of cannabis plants has been adopted by many marijuana growers in dozens of different grow setups, and it’s not always done the same way. The following steps do not describe the process exactly how Nugbuckets does it, but I’ve had identical results with main-lining cannabis this way and it saves time compared to his original steps. Many growers have asked me for a quick, concise manifolding tutorial, so here it is!

This is the super condensed version for main-lining cannabis indoors, exactly as I do it now (after some trial and error). The complete tutorial with pictures and notes is below!

Ultra Quick Guide to Building a Manifold

What You Need to Start Main-Lining Cannabis

• Healthy, fast-growing cannabis seedling
• Sharp scissors
• Plant ties (and possibly Soft Wire Ties)
• Plant yo-yos (or “yoyo supports”) – although you won’t need these to start, you’re probably going to need these to hold up all your tall, heavy colas when they start falling over from their own weight in the flowering stage!

Plant Ties – young plants
Plant ties are made of thin wire with a plastic coating on the outside. They tend to be more flimsy and don’t have a lot of strength. They are very gentle on young plants.

Soft Wire Ties – to anchor stronger stems
Soft wire ties are made of a thicker wire, with a very soft coating. These are much stronger than regular plant ties, but they will not give way to a strong stem yet will still never cut into the plant. These can be used in situations where strength is needed to hold down a thick unruly cola that wants to grow in the wrong direction. They can also be used as sturdy anchors, with the plant ties above used as “string.”

Plant Yo-Yos – when colas start fattening so much they fall over
In the flowering stage, it’s common for your buds to start falling over from their own weight. Plant yo-yos can be hung conveniently from the top of your grow tent or grow space, and the special hooks at the bottom are ideal to hold onto thick colas without causing any damage to your buds.

Main-Lining Cannabis Indoors
Nebula’s Step-By-Step Tutorial for a Wide-Based Indoor Cannabis Plant

Quick Reference Picture – Main-Lining Cannabis Diagram

1.) Create “Base”

• Let young plant grow 6 nodes
• Top to 3rd node and clean all extra growth except top 2 growth tips and their fan leaves
• Now you have 2 main colas – these form the “base” of your cannabis manifold

2.) Create 8 main colas

• Let each side grow 4 nodes
• Top to 3rd node on each side
• Instead of cleaning all other growth like in the last step, just remove all the growth from the 2nd node on each side, leaving growth from node 1 & 3 on each side
• Now you have 8 colas!

Note: You can top each of the 8 colas one more time for a total of 16 colas per plant. However, only do this if you’re going to grow big cannabis plants in a 5-gallon container or larger. For a small-to-regular sized cannabis plant, 8 colas is the perfect amount to give you the biggest buds and yields without spreading out the plant’s energy too much.

3.) Vegetative Stage

• In addition to regular plant care, specifically check plants at least twice a week to make sure everything is growing flat like a table. Older stems start getting hard and woody and are more difficult to train, so if you check plants at least twice a week you’ll be able to bend stems while they’re still young and flexible. Getting used to checking on your plants regularly is a great habit that will serve you well in your cannabis growing adventures!
• Try to fill every “space” under the grow light with colas that are a few inches away from each other, and all the same height. If at any point you can see a cola is growing taller than the others, gently bend it down and away from other colas.
• Use twisty tie to secure stems so everything stays in place, otherwise your stems will turn back up overnight!
• Keeping up with  this process throughout the vegetative stage gives you a flat, even canopy with many evenly spaced bud sites.

4.) Flowering Stage

• Switch to the flowering stage when the plant has reached half the final desired height.
• Continue to arrange colas to fill up your space under the light for first 2-3 weeks after the flip to 12/12.
• If any colas are growing much taller than the others, make sure to bend them down and away during the first few weeks, securing them just like before. This is especially important for colas growing directly under the grow light since they are most likely to grow too close to the light and get burned!
• That’s pretty much it!

Now you just wait for big fat colas to form under your grow lights! 

What if you want to make more than 8 main colas? You can top each side one more time in the manifold-building stage to create 16 colas per cannabis plant, like Bud did here:

16 cola manifold per your tutorial. Day 40 flower. Back 2 Durban Poison. Middle 2 Jack Herer. Front one Bruce Banner. It is trained so cola’s start 6″ off soil. Plant 42″ across. No support. Indoor growers can really take advantage of manifolding. ~Bud

How to Build a Cannabis Manifold – Step-By-Step Tutorial

1.) Create “Base” – Wait until the plant grows 5-6 nodes, top down to the 3rd, then clean all extra growth

Wait until your plant has grown 5-6 nodes, looks healthy, and is growing vigorously.

Why wait? If you start main-lining too early, you can stunt growth and your plant might take longer to recover through the whole process. A plant that has 6 nodes recovers incredibly quickly from topping, while a plant with less nodes than that can be stunted for weeks from a single topping.

Although it’s optimal to start the manifolding cannabis process when the plant has 5-6 nodes, it’s possible to start a little later. However, the later you start the more time you’ll have wasted in the vegetative stage (and wasted time means wasted money), so you don’t want to start late if you can!

Top down to the 3rd node and clean extra growth below it. Basically, you’re just cutting off the tip of the plant, right above the 3rd pair of real (serrated) leaves.

After cutting to the 3rd node, clean off all the vegetation below it. At this point, you only have 2 main stems. You now have created the “base” of your manifold!

This plant was topped to the 3rd node, and all the extra growth was cut away. The two growth tips on the 3rd node and the adjoining leaves are the only thing that was left.

2.) Create 8 Colas

• Wait Until Each Side Has Grown 4 Nodes
• Top to 3rd Node on Each Side
• Remove All Growth From the 2nd Node, Leaving Just Nodes 1 & 3

In this step, we’re going to wait until the new tops/colas have recovered and look like they’re growing fast. Once each side has grown 4 sets of leaves, you’re ready to go to the next step.

Wait until your marijuana plant has grown 4 nodes (pairs of leaves) on each side.

In this step, we’re going to wait until the new tops/colas have recovered and look like they’re growing fast. Then we’ll top all the new colas to the 3rd node again. This time instead of cleaning the whole stem below, we will only remove the growth from the 2nd node. This leaves you with the 1st and 3rd node on each side so after this step, you will have 8 main colas.

I think most indoor growers will be happy with 8 colas and the offshoots that grow from them, but if you do want more colas, keep the 2nd node in this step, or continue to top plants and repeat the steps again. For most growers, you want to follow the tutorial exactly, so let’s walk through this together.

Top to the 3rd node on each side (remove tip above 3rd pair of leaves). Be careful to avoid damaging the growth tips while topping the plant!

There are now 3 nodes on each “branch.” Instead of cleaning everything like the first time, you want to remove the 2nd node on each side, leaving just the 1st and 3rd nodes. You’re almost done!

Now you have just the 1st and 3rd nodes left. This leaves 4 total nodes on the plant, or 8 total growth tips/tops/colas!

Why keep node 1 and 3 on each side? The odd-numbered nodes all face the same way, and it’s easier if your 8 colas are all faced in the same direction. That being said, it doesn’t really make much difference which nodes you leave as long as you have 8 growth tips at the end, since you will be training your plant anyway. But if you keep nodes 1 and 3 in this step as the tutorial says, your manifold will look prettier and be just a little easier to train 🙂

3.) Vegetative Stage Care

As your manifolded cannabis plant is growing in the vegetative stage, watch to make sure your canopy is staying flat, like a table. Check on plants at least twice a week; it’s really easy to train cannabis plants if you’re checking on them regularly (takes just seconds) but it can be frustrating to try to train plants after their stems have already become hard and woody.

Whenever you’re checking your plants, if any stems appear taller than the others, gently bend them down and away from the center of the plant. Use a bit of twisty tie to secure stems in place so everything stays the same height. Keeping up with this process throughout the vegetative stage gives you a flat, even canopy with many bud sites.

Some of these stems have grown taller than others.

Bend taller stems down and away from the center of the plant, securing stems down so they’re all about the same height as each other.

Notice how all the stems have been bent down so they’re about the same height and spread out.

The goal is to arrange most colas around the edges of the plant, with a few colas in the middle so it makes a flat table.

Every time you bend your cannabis plants down, they will turn back up within a day or two, like this.

Not long before the switch to flowering!

Note: To avoid a hydro plant tipping in the net pot like in the above pics (which doesn’t really affect anything as far as growing but doesn’t look pretty), make sure the base of your manifold goes parallel with the length of your tub, instead of perpendicular like the above plant.

4.) Switch to the flowering stage

Once your manifolded cannabis plant has reached half the final desired height, it’s time to initiate the flowering/budding stage. You do this by switching the lights to a 12/12 schedule (12 hours light, 12 hours dark each day). Your plant may double in height during the first 3-4 weeks of the flowering stage (known as the flowering stretch) so it’s important to flip to flower while you still have plenty of room left.

Right before the switch to flowering, give your plant a minimal last cleanup by taking off the big fan leaves, especially in the middle and bottom of the plant. You also want to tuck or remove any really large fan leaves blocking bud sites. Be careful not to damage any growth tips at the base of each leaf.

How many leaves to take off? When in doubt, take fewer leaves than you think you should since you can always come back later!

Give your cannabis plant one last minimal cleanup before the switch to flowering; especially remove large fan leaves.

The manifold you created will power the growth of each of your colas through the first few weeks of flowering.

By the time it’s 3 weeks after the switch to 12/12, plenty of new buds should be forming.

3 weeks after switching to 12/12

If the plant is getting bushy, defoliate the plant again around week 3 by removing the bigger fan leaves, and all the lower stuff that’s in major shadow. In general, if you’re unsure defoliate lightly during the flowering stage since you can always take more away but you can’t put leaves back. The plant will stop making new leaves altogether around week 5-6 after the switch to 12/12.

Your cannabis plant is probably bushy and buds have started forming 3-4 weeks after switching to 12/12. At this point, you may want to do another defoliation session by removing most of the biggest fan leaves. Learn more about cannabis defoliation in the flowering stage.

These are those cannabis plants after a light defoliation session. I removed big fan leaves, bottom leaves, and any leaves that were covering bud sites (to expose the newly growing buds to direct light).

Learn more about using defoliation for bigger yields

Any buds in shadow won’t fatten up properly, so make sure to keep the lower part of the plant clean so all energy is focused on the top main buds. Remove everything near the bottom of the plant that will never make it to the top canopy, including leaves and “suckers” (small stems and growth tips).

Remove leaves and small stems below the line in this diagram.

Plants will slow down in vegetative growth around week 3 or 4 into the flowering stage, and by week 6 they will have stopped growing new leaves altogether, and just be focusing on fattening buds. You need to make sure to leave enough healthy leaves to last until harvest time!

Example of a different manifolded plant

3 weeks after switch to 12/12 – Before Defoliation

3 weeks after switch to 12/12 – After Defoliation

39 days into flowering (2.5 weeks later)

As the cannabis flowering stage progresses, you may still prune away any small growth underneath that doesn’t get light, as well as big fan leaves that block bud sites and can’t be tucked away. Although defoliation (removing leaves) helps with better light penetration on bushy plants in the flowering stage, it’s important to remember that you can always take more but you can’t put leaves back. After 5-6 weeks of 12/12 your plant won’t really grow any more leaves at all! Be careful of going overboard.

Notice how the bottom of the plant has been cleared of leaves, and most big fan leaves have been removed.

Just before harvest.

How much of the manifolded cannabis plant do you keep clean?

All big fan leaves should be removed, but how long you leave each cola depends on the side of your grow light. Bigger grow lights can support longer colas. You want to remove the parts of the plant that will never get access to light, but leave the parts that can take advantage of all the light that does make it down into the plant.

The above plant is under a 250W HPS, which can’t “reach” as far down into the plant as a bigger light. The colas are only about 12″ long because everything below that point was removed because it was in shadow.

The two plants below are under a 600W grow light, which can penetrate two feet into the plant. That is why much more was left on each cola. The parts of the plant that were in shadow were all removed but the remaining buds are still almost 2 feet long. Because the 600W light reaches that far into the plant, these buds will fatten up all the way down.

Basically, clean off parts of the plant that won’t ever get light. Leave the parts of the plant that get direct light.

No more major defoliation after 6 weeks into 12/12. Plant growth slows down around week 4-6 and most strains stop making leaves altogether after week 6-7. You need to make sure to keep enough healthy leaves to last until harvest.

With your well-maintained cannabis plant under a nice grow light, you will be rewarded with long, dense thick colas with huge nuggets of buds! You also get some very chunky buds wherever side stems are exposed to light and air.

Harvest (this is just one of the plants from above!)

Training Tutorial: Get Extra Help Building a Manifold

Cannabis Main-Lining: Tips & Hints 

Strain Choice is Important

Matching Cannabis Strains

If you plan to grow more than one strain at a time, it’s a good idea to spend a little extra time thinking about matching genetics that “play well” with each other and that will benefit from having a manifold. When main-lining, it helps to choose strains that are well-matched. Main-lining doesn’t change the nature of the strain and it can be a pain in the butt if you mix a strain that stays short with a strain that tends to grow tall. If you have a strain that tends to stay short, main-lining will help spread out the plant, but it won’t cause the plant to grow the long colas if the strain doesn’t tend to make long colas. Main-lined cannabis plants will grow with the same patterns as normal, just with a manifold. Main-lining won’t force a plant to stay short or grow tall. Their height is determined by you choosing well-matched strains and keeping up with training/bending your cannabis plants.

Works Best with Medium-to-Tall Strains

When growing cannabis indoors, the best benefits from main-lining come from growing strains that are considered “medium” or “tall” in height. These plants will have a bigger “flowering stretch” and may double or even triple in height after the switch to the flowering stage. This stretch is what creates the long colas of a main-lined plant. With a short plant that doesn’t have much of a flowering stretch, you aren’t going to get those long colas, and may not going to get the most from main-lining, especially compared to the time put in during the vegetative stage building the manifold. For shorter strains, or when growing short plants, other types of plant training like Topping might be better at increasing yields and will take less time in the vegetative stage.

Not the Best Choice for Auto-Flowering Strains of Cannabis

It is difficult to form a full manifold if you try to main-line auto-flowering strains. They do not have much time to recover from any plant training technique that involves cutting the plant. If you want to try out main-lining, it is highly recommended to do so with a photoperiod strain (it is unlikely you’ll ever run into an auto-flowering strain unless you order an autoflowering seed from a seedbank – learn more about autos here – https://www.growweedeasy.com/autoflowering-vs-photoperiod).

Start from Seed if Possible

The main-lining cannabis process is much simpler with plants grown from seed since they usually have symmetrical nodes, unlike clones. If you decide to start main-lining clones, just be aware of the overall structure of the manifold you’re trying to create. Don’t follow these step-by-step instructions for clones since this tutorial was designed for main-lining cannabis grown from seed, but use your judgment to try to create a plant with as similar a structure as possible.

Growing Environment

Use Penetrating Grow Lights

Indoor cannabis main-lining seems to get the best results under powerful lights that have deep penetration. With main-lining, you grow long thick colas, and you need a powerful light to fill those colas up with bud. Because lights like CFLs & fluorescent grow lights don’t have much penetration, they aren’t recommended for main-lining. Main-lining performs best with MH/HPS grow lights, CMH/LEC grow lights, or LED grow lights of 150W size or greater. These lights have deep enough penetration to fill the long colas with bud, so they work well with manifolding. With small LEDs, CFLs, or fluorescent grow lights, standard training like topping will be more effective than manifolding at increasing yields and will take less vegetative time.

Cannabis Plant Training Tutorial – LST and Topping Technique!

Topping Technique

When topping, leave a little part of the old stem above the topping point. This helps reinforce the manifold and prevent any main stems from splitting as they are thickened through the manifold process.

I know this may be hard for those who want to make everything completely even and neat. But leaving a little extra stem will help prevent your “elbows” from splitting.

After the colas are well formed and you have a thick stem and manifold, you’ll be able to see the little mini stems (they won’t have grown at all, while the colas would have thickened coniderably). If they bug you, you can cut them off then. I just leave them on until the end.

Combine Main-Lining with LST

Main-lining works very well when mixed with LST (low stress training – gentle bending) to hold down plants in the spaces you want. Just remember that after you tie down a part of the plant, it will immediately start turning up and towards the light.

Split Stems

If cannabis plants ever get an open wound or split any part of their stems, make sure to reinforce the injury (if needed) and immediately wrap with electrical tape, duct tape, or even scotch tape. The leaves on the damaged stem may wilt, but if you secure the injury fast enough, life will come back to the leaves. When using this technique, always make sure you check on the injury regularly to make sure the tape isn’t choking the stem.

How to Secure Cannabis Plants While Main-Lining 

You will need to use a few different tools to secure down your plants at various phases of the manifolding process. These are the tools that have worked best for us. You can use whatever you’d like, but I do warn you not to use anything sharp (like string or thread) as it can start cutting into your plants once they start getting bigger and fighting back. The tools listed below will never run into that problem since they were explicitly made for training plants.

Securing your new colas/tops down

Where to Tie… You can tie your new tops down to anything handy – the sides of your container, net pots, etc. Just make sure that you’re tying your colas to something that moves with the plant. You don’t want to tie to a nearby object, use weights on the ground, etc.

When you move the plant for whatever reason, you want the ties to move with the plant. This prevents accidental cola breakage. Growers almost always end up needing to move their plants for one reason or another during a grow, and it’s just a good practice to make sure the plant and container are self-contained and can be moved without disturbing the LST you are doing.

Avoid Using String

It will work well at first, but it can start digging into the “skin” of your plant as it gets bigger unless you cut them off first. When building a manifold, the stems and stalks will end up getting big, and you want something that will

What Are the Best Ties to Use?

I like using a mix of “plant ties” and “soft wire ties” which are both made for gardening and are more gentle on the plant than string. I recommend using both. The plant ties are good for young plants, and soft wire ties are better for larger plants with strong stems.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what tools you can use to secure your plants in the shape you want, let me walk you through everything.

This plant was secured with plant ties, which were hooked to the edges of the container.

In the beginning, I use plant ties. The plant ties are very gentle on young stems & they can be easily molded into any shape, allowing you to create hooks to gently move young cannabis stems where you want them. Once you build your manifold, you won’t need these first ties, and they’ll naturally fall off.

When the plant is responding to training by growing up at the tips, that’s a sign that the main-lining is going well.

The growth tips of a healthy plant grow upwards and towards the light.

At this point, you may start noticing that the base of your two main colas are starting to “beef up” as the plant sends ALL its resources to just those two stems.

The plant is strengthening the connections between the main stem and the new colas, which causes bulging at the base of the colas.

More info on…

Plant Ties – young plants

Plant ties are made of thin wire with a plastic coating on the outside. This material usually comes in a long spool so you can cut off as much as you need at a time. The container usually has a built-in cutter so you can quickly get a piece without any other equipment. They tend to be more flimsy than some of the other methods to secure plants – they don’t have a lot of strength. But this is part of what makes them so great – they are very gentle on young plants.

Soft Wire Ties – to anchor stronger stems

When plant ties aren’t strong enough, you can use soft wire ties to hook around colas or anchors, and use plant ties as the “string”. Soft wire ties are made of a thicker wire, with a very soft coating. These are much stronger than the palnt ties, but they will give way to a strong stem and will never cut into the plant. These can be used in situations where strength is needed to hold down a thick unruly cola which wants to grow in the wrong direction. They can also be used as sturdy anchors, with the plant ties above used as “string.”

Plant Yo-Yos – when colas start fattening so much they fall over

These can be hung conveniently from the top of your grow tent, and the special hooks at the bottom are ideal to hold onto thick colas without causing any damage to your buds. When colas start getting too big to hold themselves up, plant yoyos will help you greatly. With this technique, the plant will produce these long dense colas that start falling over under their own weight and are hard to secure with other methods. Plant yo-yos are perfect for gently stringing up colas where you want without damaging buds. In order to use plant yo-yos, you need something to attach to at the top of the grow space (easy with a grow tent, but may need some creativity in other grow spaces).

Ready to start training your plant?

After topping your plant, you use LST (low stress training) to hold the new colas down to make a relatively straight line. LST basically means gently bending your plants to do what you want. Bending the new colas down will keep the manifold short without much effort, and helps with the whole process of getting the plant to produce a great manifold.

Basically, you’re just bending the colas down and away from the center of the plant, and then securing them so they grow in that position.

You got this!

Jump to…

Nugbuckets’ Main-Lining Tutorial

More Cannabis Plant Training Techniques

Growing Problems & Symptoms

10-Step Quick Start Guide to Growing Cannabis

—

This cannabis main-lining tutorial is a work in progress! I (Nebula) did not create “main-lining” and am not the first grower to try main-lining cannabis. Several marijuana growers asked me to put together a main-lining tutorial based on what I’ve learned so far in my setup, so I am sharing my experiences and personal technique for making a cannabis manifold. I hope this information helps other growers!

Main-Lining – Building a Cannabis Manifold
Create a Marijuana Plant with 8+ Big Colas Using a Simple Topping Technique

The technique of “main-lining” or manifolding cannabis was first described and named by a talented grower known as Nugbuckets. Main-Lining (building a manifold) for growing cannabis is a relatively new technique on the grow scene. At least, it’s only recently that cannabis growers have been talking about it by the name “main-lining” or “manifolding.” Chances are growers have been using similar techniques for decades, but only now has it come to be described by this name.

The idea of main-lining using Nugbuckets’ original technique is to build a “manifold” at the base of your cannabis plant to efficiently deliver resources to all colas. During Nugbuckets’ process of building a manifold, the grower chooses to create a plant with usually 8 or 16 colas (8 is most common, 16 for ScrOG setups, and 32 is rarely an efficient use of plant resources). Here’s an example of a Nugbuckets manifold:

In Nebula’s cannabis manifold tutorial above, she does things just a little bit differently to save time in the vegetative stage, yet while being able to still accomplish the same results as far as increasing bud size and yields!

The post Bigger Buds with Nebula’s Easy Manifold (Cannabis Main-Lining Tutorial) appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

Quick Grow Snapshot

• Strains: Blackjack & Wonder Woman
• Grow medium: Hydroponics / top-fed DWC (deep water culture)
• Grow Light: 600W HID
  • Metal Halide (MH) bulb in vegetative stage
  • High Pressure Sodium (HPS) bulb in flowering stage
• Nutrients or Additives: General Hydroponics Flora Trio & Hydroguard (formally Aquashield)

View the complete grow setup here

June 16: Seeds sprouted
August 22: Switched to 12-12 flowering light schedule
November 19: Harvest!

Vegetative Stage: 67 days (2 months, 6 days)
Flowering Stage: 89 days (2 months, 28 days)

Total Time – Seed to Harvest:
156 days (5 months, 3 days)

Final Yield
23.09 oz

View full grow journal below!

Vegetative Stage

We started with 2 feminized BlackJack and 2 feminized Wonder Woman seeds.

Because these seeds were feminized, we knew that all the seeds would grow into bud-producing female plants, so we didn’t have to worry about sexing these seeds as they grow older. Learn about buying cannabis seeds online (including feminized seeds), right here.

Here’s a quick diagram to show how growing in a top-fed DWC hydropnic system works:

Learn more about growing cannabis with bubbleponics

Seeds were sprouted June 16 via the paper towel method and were transferred to rockwool cubes and placed in DWC system on June 17. All 4 seedlings were initially placed in one tub together for easy care. Later all chosen plants can be moved to their own tub.

June 17 – Sprouted seeds placed in system

We initially started plants on 24 hour light schedule (24 hours of light a day), but kept the new seedlings several feet under the powerful Metal Halide bulb (which was also turned down to 60% power). The reservoir was filled with plain pH’ed tap water until the plants grew their second set of “real” (serrated) cannabis leaves.

Becasue of the top-fed aspect to our DWC system, we didn’t need to worry about watering the seedlings. We simply needed to sit back and wait for the sprouts to appear above ground, and for the roots to follow the top-drip down into the water reservoir below.

Here they are a few days later on June 29. By this point, we had turned the Metal Halide light onto 100% power, and had moved the light a little closer. This is also when we began adding nutrients to the water, at about 1/4 strength compared to the directions provided by General Hydroponics for a recirculating hydroponic system.

June 29 – Given their first nutrients!

One of the net pots is removed, so you can see the water reservoir below.

You can see that the top right BlackJack seedling is struggling behind the other three seedlings. Luckily, we planted 2 seeds from each strain so that we would be able to throw away the two least-healthy seedlings. Some seedlings just come out of the gate faster than the others, and we look for the ones that seem to be growing fast & healthy, and which have healthy roots.

July 11

We selected the most healthy and vigorous seedling from each strain to become the main plants for our grow.

July 13 – Chose best plant from each strain

We moved our 2 winners into their own separate tubs.

July 15 – Moved to separate tubs

July 18 – Started plant training (main-lining)

Learn all about the main-lining technique here:
https://www.growweedeasy.com/main-lining-technique-nugbuckets

We began main-lining them, which involves using cutting and training techniques to create a manifold at the roots with 8 main colas.

This was our first time main-lining a cannabis plant!

We began by topping down to the 3rd node (set of leaves), then cleaning off all other vegetation that wasn’t on the 3rd node.

At this point, the young vegetating plants were over a month old. Normally it is considered best to start main-lining plants when they have about 6 nodes in total.

When we main-lined our plant, they had more nodes, and were a bit older than they needed to be. While this didn’t affect our results with main-lining, it did unnecessarily add a few extra weeks onto our vegetative stage time.

While we were pleased with our results (as you will see), we believe we should have begun main-lining earlier, and we believe doing so would have cut off a couple extra weeks from our veg time.

July 24 – immediate after second cut

The next step to main-lining is to main-lining is to again top the plants. Now that the plant has been topped twice, she has 4 main colas.

A day later, here’s a view from above the Wonder Woman (click for closeup)

July 26 – Removed other growth tips, leaving just 4 mains

At this point we only have 4 growth tips on the plant. We want 8, so we will repeat this process one more time.

During this point, we had a heat wave. And we believe that the plants seemed to be growing a bit more slowly than usual.

August 1 – Topped again for 8 mains

After the two plants had grown a bit bushy again, with a few more growth tips, we topped both plants again for total of 8 mains. This is basically the end of our main-lining and plant training.

Before

After

Here they are!

Now that we have main-lined the plants to produce 8 main colas, we must give them a little bit more time to gain some size before we signal them to start budding by changing the timers to a 12-12 flowering light schedule.

By allowing plants to get a bit bigger in the vegetative stage, we prepare the perfect structure to produce a lot of buds and get the most from the grow light in the flowering stage.

The only “training” we are doing at this point is tying down any branches down and away from the center of the plant. This helps the plant spread out in a desirable shape with a flat canopy.

Other than that, we are just giving the plants nutrient water and allowing them to naturally grow into a beautiful main-lined shape.

August 13 – Plants are starting to get bushy again

Flowering Stage

August 22 – Switched to the Flowering Stage

Flowering time! This is when plants start making buds!

We changed the timer to be on a 12-12 “flowering” schedule to initiate flowering. The process of giving a photoperiod cannabis plant 12 hours of light and 12 hours of uninterrupted darkness each day caused the cannabis plants to “get the message” that winter was coming and it was time to start flowering..

Growers artificially create a 12-12 light environment for cannabis plants grown indoors to signal the plant to start flowering (making buds).

We switched to the 12-12 flowering light schedule on August 22, so plants were vegged for just under 9 weeks.

While it is generally recommended to switch to an HPS bulb during the flowering stage, we kept the Metal Halide in for a little bit extra time as the blue light from the Metal Halide tends to reduce “stretching.” The yellow light from an HPS is great for flowering/budding, but does tend to cause the plant to grow taller or “stretch” more.

Whenever a cannabis plant is switched to flowering, it will tend to grow a lot of height all at once, known as the “flowering stretch.” By keeping the Metal Halide bulb in for a bit longer, we hoped to reduce the stretch a bit, since we were very happy with the structure of the plant.

August 25 – A view of the two plants

August 28 – The grow tent is starting to get filled up

August 29 – We switched to an HPS bulb to help promote flowering

You will notice that the HPS bulb produces a much more yellow light spectrum. This yellowish/pink light spectrum helps promote budding in cannabis plants. At this point, we still have not seen signs of flowers/buds (which show up as wispy white hairs on the joints of the stems for female plants).

September 7 – Flowering stretch! Look how much they’ve grown in just 9 days

As you will soon see, pretty much all the extra growth that was added during the flowering stretch will turn into long thick colas covered in buds.

Here are those first buds beginning to form

The manifolds we created in the vegetative stage have grown strong and thick, providing a steady supply of nutrients to the plants from the roots:

September 11 – Buds are popping up everywhere

September 19 

September 20 – The Wonder Woman is fattening up faster than the BlackJack

BlackJack Bud

Wonder Woman Bud

September 28 

September 30 – Comparison of the colas

The BlackJack colas are growing long, thin and spear-shaped, absolutely covered in trichomes

Throughout the flowering stage, the BlackJack has proven to be extremely sensitive to nutrients, and has shown signs of nutrient burn (burnt leaf tips) even at 1/4 strength levels of the General Hydroponic nutrients.

It’s important to note that the heat may be partially a cause of this. Plants drink a lot more water when the temperature is higher, and this may contribute to nutrient overload (nutrient burn) when it’s hot. This is why DWC growers may notice that plants seem to prefer lower levels of nutrients in the summer when they’re drinking a lot of water.

The Wonder Woman colas are growing extremely thick and rounded

In contrast to the BlackJack, the Wonder Woman seems to continue demanding more and more nutrients throughout the flowering stage. We struggled with her showing yellowing leaves (not getting enough nutrients) even while the BlackJack was showing signs of nute burn at the same nutrient strength.

We upped the nutrient strength for the Wonder Woman to nearly twice as much nutrients as the BlackJack from this point on.

I also must admit I was a bit disappointed at how the BlackJack plant was growing at first in the flowering stage (she was a dream in veg during the plant training). But at this point in the flowering stage, she didn’t impress me at all.

All the buds were thin and spear-shaped, while the Wonder Woman was growing these huge top-heavy buds. However, the BlackJack colas were incredibly long and continued to steadily fatten up throughout the flowering stage.

Despite the lack of bud growth so far, the smell from the BlackJack is already amazing, very spicy like a Haze strain, though this smell will get pretty overwhelming in the grow tent by the time harvest approaches. The Wonder Woman produced fat indica looking buds with a throw-back skunky smell that didn’t appear until later in flowering, and not as intense of a smell as the BlackJack.

Things were going great, then…

Another problem…

About 6 weeks after changing to the 12-12 flowering light schedule, we ran into another problem, only this problem actually made us happy 🙂

The plant colas were getting extremely heavy, and stems felt ridiculously weak in comparison. By week 6, the colas were falling all over each other and we were worried about mold (from fat buds touching each other), and also about making sure we were maximizing light to the leaves and colas.

October 9 – Buds start falling over

Plant Support Spools: We got a very helpful tool made exactly for this scenario, known as “plant support spools” from our local hydro store (examples: Sun Spool, Support Spool, Yoyo plant hanger, etc) in order to hold up the colas.

These worked fabulously, and allowed us to hang each cola directly from the top of the grow tent, opening up the plant to both reduce the chance of mold while allowing a great deal more leaf surface area to capture energy from the grow lights above.

Take a look!

October 11 – Tied plants up with plant support spools

Close-up of a support spool below
(hooks the heavy cola directly to the ceiling of the grow tent with string)

October 18 – Buds are continuing the develop

A BlackJack cola

A Wonder Woman cola

October 24 – Everything is still fattening up nicely

A view of the grow tent, with a blue lighter in the middle for size comparison

From this point, the buds are continuing to fatten, but we are most concerned with the color of the “trichomes” (glittery stuff that covers the buds).

Here is what the trichomes look at this point – still mostly clear
(which means it’s too early to harvest)

When looking at these trichomes under a microscope, we can see them turn from clear to milky-white as the cannabis grows in potency.

When the THC begins to degrade, the milky-white trichomes will begin to turn a golden color (often referred to as “amber”). For a more “stony” effect from the buds (and less of the racing thoughts or paranoia which is slightly more common with early-harvested buds), we opt to harvest our buds after at least a few trichomes have begun to turn amber.

Learn more about when to harvest: https://www.growweedeasy.com/harvest

November 17 – Getting close to harvest…

The BlackJack is listed as having a 9-11 week flowering time, while the Wonder Woman is 8-10 weeks. These times are generally considered to start when the plant first starts showing signs of flowers/buds, which usually happens about 2 weeks after switching to a 12-12 flowering light schedule for female cannabis plants. In my experience, and from what I’ve heard from other growers, both these strains tend to do better when left a bit longer than the breeder’s estimate.

Yet no matter what is stated by the breeder of a strain, I highly recommend using a magnifer to look at the trichomes of a cannabis plant. Each plant is a bit different, and the trichomes are the best way to know the exact right time to harvest.

Learn how to determine exactly when to harvest your cannabis so your buds have the greatest potency and medical effects:
https://www.growweedeasy.com/harvest

On November 17, we saw what we were looking for plants finally appeared ready to harvest!

Here’s a look at the trichomes…

We took these videos using the Carson zOrb hooked up to a laptop

BlackJack Trichomes

Wonder Woman Trichomes

At this point, we began flushing the plants (feeding them pure pH’ed water until harvest):

Before we harvested the plant, we were hoping to pull a pound from the tent this grow, and we were feeling very hopeful as the buds were long, dense, and covered in resin.

November 19 – Harvest!

Buds were harvested on November 19, trimmed (and it was a very easy trim job due to the fact that pretty much all the buds came from huge colas with no larfy smaller buds, due to the main-lining we’d completed in the vegetative stage).

A big cola from the Wonder Woman plant

The BlackJack buds weren’t as thick, but still long, dense and covered in trichomes

The buds were hung upside down to dry in our grow tent

Buds dried for about 6 days until smaller stems started snapping, and buds were cut off the branches everything was jarred up. We made medical cannabis oil capsules out of the trim.

Final dry yield was 23.09 ounces for 2 plants

We weighed everything out on our digital scale after buds were dried and trimmed, before placing in jars. We were expecting about a pound (16 oz), so we were both pleasantly surprised by the final yields!

Learn how to grow your own cannabis plants exactly like this below!

Is It Time to Grow Your Own?

Here’s a list of everything used in this grow journal:
(get more info about this setup from the grower right here)

Cannabis Strains From This Journal

• Wonder Woman – Creates many, MANY top-heavy bud sites. High yield. Very potent.
• BlackJack – Covered in trichomes (great for extracts or hash). Pungent spicy smell similar to a Haze. Highly requested medical strain.

Where can I buy seeds safely?

Growing Environment

Grow Tent:
GrowLab GL120 ( 3’11” x 3’11” x 6’7″)

The grow tent is set up near a window in so we could exhaust the heat from the lights.

Grow Lights & Exhaust

Ballast (for 600W bulbs):
GGL 600W Dimmable ballast

Bulbs:

• MH bulb: SunMaster 600 Watt Cool Deluxe
• HPS bulb: Digimax Digital Lamp 600 Watt

Hood/Reflector: Sun Systems Blazer 6” Reflector

Exhaust Fan:
Can-Fan Max 6” with speed control

6″ Ducting

Learn how to hook everything up (grow lights & exhaust)

Growing Medium

Hydroponics: Deep water culture (DWC) hydroponic system with top-feed, also known as “Bubbleponics”

Learn how to grow this way: Top-Fed DWC “Bubbleponics” tutorial

Nutrients: General Hydroponics Flora Trio

Additives: Aquashield

pH Tester: General Hydroponics pH Test kit

Tip: Quickly Change Your Reservoir with a Water Transfer Pump!

It makes me so sad to see people struggling to change the water in their hydroponics reservoir. A water transfer pump will make your life so much easier. The inexpensive Sierra Tools water transfer pump does the job better than any other water transfer pump we’ve tried in its price range. This will allow you to easily remove reservoir water and add new water to your reservoir without disturbing the plants. Note: You need 2 x D batteries for this pump to work. We use rechargeable Eneloop batteries.

Smell Control

We used a couple quarts of Ona Gel to control odors for this small medical grow. We weren’t worried about the smell of the air coming out of our exhaust, just of the smell in our living areas (when guests come over). Many growers use a carbon filter as part of their exhaust system, which is much more effective (when set up properly) and will remove just about all scent from the air both in the grow room and outside where the air is being vented out.

Learn how to control odors in the grow room

Harvest, Trimming, Drying & Curing

Magnifier – Jeweler’s Loupe or a Digital Magnifier (we use the Carson zOrb hooked up to a laptop)

Shears for trimming: Fiskars Microtip Snips

Several Quart Mason Jars for Curing

Rubber Gloves (otherwise your hands will be covered in resin)

Learn how to professionally dry and cure your buds every time

Other Gardening Tools

Gently Tie Down plants:
Any gardening ties will do –  We use Study Twists & Soft Wire Tie

Hold Up Heavy Buds:
Plant support spools (Sun Spool, Support Spool, Yoyo plant hanger, etc)

Small Fan For Inside the Tent:
The exhaust fan does the heavy lifting as far as air exchange, but a small desk fan inside the tent can help keep air moving below and within the plant canopy.

Humidity & Temperature Monitor:
This Ambient Weather WS-07 Wireless Thermo-Hygrometer lets you check the readings from another room (don’t forget to get 6 AAA batteries

Read frequently asked questions below!

How big is your tent? How do you keep the temperature down?

I am currently using the GrowLab GL120, which is 3’11” x 3’11” x 6’7″ (a tiny bit smaller than 4’x 4′ x 7′). I don’t fill the complete tent so I could probably get away with something that was 3′ x 3′ x 6′, but I like having the extra space to work with the plants.

I use ducting and an exhaust fan to pull hot air out of tent and through a nearby window. The exhaust fan I use is the Can-Fan Max 6” with speed control. It has 3 speeds and is about as loud as a regular powerful room fan when it is set on high. It works pretty well even though I have no AC. Even in the midst of summer, I was able to keep temps under control as long as the lights were kept off during the hottest 6 hours of the day. Now that summer is over, I don’t have any problem with heat.

For complete details, here is a complete explanation of all the parts included in this setup.

Is DWC hydroponics a good choice for a new grower?

DWC is very rewarding once you get a handle of it. It really makes you feel like a mad scientist when you’re mixing up the reservoir.

Some people start with hydroponics and do very well. Other people prefer to start with something that seems more familiar like a hand-watered grow. While grower Sirius started directly with top-fed DWC as his first type of grow, Nebula started growing cannabis in pots of coco coir using CFLs.

If you do decide to try growing cannabis in DWC, definitely don’t beat yourself up if you run into problems your first DWC grow. The cool thing about DWC is if you keep an eye on the plant, you can usually recover from most problems if you react quickly.

I recommend keeping it simple for your first DWC grow. I believe a lot of growers try to add a whole bunch of different nutrients and supplements all at once to make things better, but it can sometimes cause unexpected reactions. I’d stick to a single nutrient line without too many bells & whistles.

For DWC, I like the General Hydroponics Flora nutrient trio (just follow their included schedule for “recirculating hydro systems,” at reduced strength) and Botanicare Aquashield for root health. Those were the only nutrients/supplements we used for this whole grow. I wouldn’t add anything else unless you notice a problem (except maybe Cal-Mag if you know you have soft water or are using distilled/RO/filtered water).

DWC has great advantages(faster vegetative growth being the biggest one compared to soil), but a lot of growers find it tough to get dialed in. You must commit to maintaining your reservoir, which takes at least 20 minutes a week. It’s also important to watch over the plants closely (we check in daily) because if things go bad in DWC, they go bad fast. On the flip side, you also have total control to fix problems almost instantly too, since you can always completely change the reservoir and the roots have a completely new environment.

We have been growing in DWC for a few years, but on a smaller scale (LEDs, CFLs). This is our 3rd full run in this tent with a 600W HID. Last yield was less than a pound, so we are pretty happy with this harvest.

We added a few weeks into our vegetative stage due to a heat wave. We were growing two long-flowering strains and we harvested when the trichomes were pretty much all cloudy with a few ambers here and there.

We went a big longer than the breeder’s recommendations (which estimated 9-11 weeks for these strains). In my experience, if you wait to harvest until all the trichomes turn cloudy with a few amber, it often takes a few weeks longer than the breeder’s rec. Many growers harvest earlier and are happy with the results, but a few ambers is our preference.

No matter what the breeder says, I recommend that growers always go by the trichomes. Every plant is different. I believe most plants have at least a 2 week harvest window when they are good to harvest, and it’s up to each grower to determine what works best, especially for small medical grows like this one.

Learn  when to harvest your cannabis:
https://www.growweedeasy.com/harvest

How do you clean your reservoir? I’m using the 10 gallon totes like yours and they are a pain to clean or change the water!

As far as changing the reservoir, we use a cheap water transfer pump to easily pump water in and out of the reservoir. This cheap battery operated Sierra Tools water transfer pump does the job better than any other water transfer pump we’ve tried its price range. This will allow you to easily remove reservoir water and add new water to your reservoir without disturbing the plants. You need 2 x D batteries for this pump to work, just for your information.

Between harvests, I generally clean the reservoir with bleach water or just regular hot soapy water. I throw away the net pots and buy new ones. I also replace all the tubing (I bought a big spool of tubing a while back) instead of trying to clean them out. Lastly, I check all the airstones, pumps and individual parts to make sure everything still works properly and get the system going for a couple days before I germinate any new seeds.

I can’t believe you got plants that big with those little pots!

Those little pots are called ‘net pots’. They are used to hold the seedling plant roots until they grow down into the water reservoir below. The roots are actually sitting in the grey 10 gallon bins which are full of nutrient water. It’s known as a DWC (deep water culture) hydroponics setup.

What are the other empty pots for? Dead plants or future grows? Also, are you growing in clay balls or what is the medium?

This setup allows you to start 6 plants at a time. I use them to plant more than one seed at a time and pick the best one to grow. I also use the other holes to access the reservoir, for example to check levels, add/drain water, etc. Those clay balls are known as hydroton, but they actually don’t make hydroton anymore. I just have a huge bag of it from years ago. There’s replacements out there that are just as good.

What’s the advantage of hydroton vs coir or soil?

Each growth method has their own advantages and disadvatages.

• Organic Super Soil – A hand-watered grow like a plant in a pot of organic super soil could arguably be one of the easiest ways to grow, since you basically just need to water the plants. A big advantage of making your own organic super soil is that these growers often don’t need to worry about nutrients or pH throughout their grow. They make the soil right for a plant like cannabis (usually involving a period of composting or letting the soil cook, to achieve the right levels of microbes which basically break down nutrients from the soil and feed them to the roots), then just water the plant, and let her do her thing. A lot of organic soil growers claim that their buds have a better taste than buds grown other ways, and that organic growing is more natural. Unfortunately, this is subjective, so the benefits are mostly up to the growers taste. The biggest time-sink in this type of grow would likely be the process of mixing up and cooking the soil.
• Regular Soil – In a regular soil grow (like if you just buy soil from the store), growers don’t have to worry about mixing their own soil or composting, but they do have to worry about factors like providing nutrients to the plant (as it will naturally use up all the nutrients in the soil). They also have to worry about monitoring the pH of the roots, because they don’t have the teaming army of microbes to do it for them. Remember, if the pH at the roots is too high or too low, the plant doesn’t have access to the nutrients and will show deficiencies even if the nutrients are there in the soil. This method takes a little more work while the plant is growing since you have to feed some amount of nutrients and monitor pH, but is much easier and quicker to get started than mixing and composting your own soil which makes it attractive for a lot of new growers. Also, many people have already grown at least some kind of plant in soil before, so it’s a lot more intuitive for some people than hydroponics.
• Hydroponics – Hydroponic means that the plants are getting their nutrients directly from the water as opposed to the soil. That means you can grow a plant in a soilless medium like coco coir, and it is still considered hydroponic because there are no nutrients in coco coir (coco coir is just an inert medium to hold the roots). When you’re getting into hydroponic setups like coco coir or DWC, you are entirely responsible for 100% of the nutrients the plant gets. You are also entirely responsible for maintaining the pH. Basically you are doing the “job” that the microbes were doing in the organic super soil setup. Hydroponics can be intimidating because most people do not have experience providing nutrients and managing pH this way. However, just like mixing your own super soil, you can easily follow an exact recipe that has been proven by other growers and get great results on your first time. One of the biggest advantages of hydroponics over soil is that the plants grow much faster vegetatively, and also tend to get higher yields. This is partially because you are basically “chewing up the food” before you give it to the plants. You make it easier for the plant to get the exact nutrients needed, and the plant will grow faster/produce more. Some growers believe that hydroponic bud does not taste as good as organically grown buds. I do not find this to be the case (many people ask if I grow organic when they taste my DWC-grown buds, and I don’t use organic nutrients). I believe the biggest factor is causing an unpleasant “nutrient taste” is from feeding too high levels of nutrients during the late flowering stage, and also from poor drying/curing practices. This is an ongoing debate and I definitely don’t claim to know the answer.
  Sirius: Personally, I find hydroponic cannabis to be far more potent on a regular basis. This is reflected by the fact that many medical dispesaries tend to sell organic cannabis at a lower cost, even for the same strains. If we’re speaking purely about things that can actually be measured, hydroponic growing outperforms organic growing in every way except ease after the initial setup. That being said, the debate is still ongoing!

I know that was a lot of info, but I hope it helps you and other growers make the choice.

To summarize:

• Organic super soil – quite a bit of prep work before you grow, ultra easy-to-maintain during the grow, possibly more flavorful buds.
• Regular soil – easy to get started, slightly more work during the grow.
• Coco coir & other soilless mediums – easy to get started, perhaps a little more work than regular soil during the grow – faster growth.
• DWC (or other hydroponic setups where the roots are fully immersed in water) – Most effort to maintain, fastest growth, biggest yields.

What nute strength were you giving them? (ppm/were you following the Generaly Hydropnoics schdule for Flora trio amounts)

We started by giving them the recirculating nutrient schedule from General Hydroponics at about 1/4 to 1/2 strength.

The Blackjack wanted much less nutrients than the Wonder Woman, and I gave her plain water sometimes while the Wonder Woman took the 1/2 strength dose and wanted more. It was hot this summer, and they were drinking a lot, so they needed lower concentrations than what would likely be appropriate for the cooler months.

What are you going to try next?

The next grow will be the same setup with a few adjustments:

• Strains: Most likely Sour Diesel & Headband
• We are considering adding a Silicon supplement in addition to the GH trio & Aquashield
• Topping the plant earlier to begin main-lining – exactly when the plant hits 6 nodes

Jump to….

I want to make a grow setup just like this!

How to grow with bubbleponics (top-fed DWC)

How to set up your MH/HPS grow lights

Where can I safely buy medical cannabis strains?

The post 600W Hydroponic Grow Journal – 23.09 oz Harvest! appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

Once a grower is able to successfully take a plant from seed (or clone) to harvest, a common new goal is: “How can I do it better?”

The answer: efficiency!

Although cannabis is a weed and has an easy time growing, it doesn’t do so in an efficient manner for indoor growing.

Cannabis naturally tends to grow in the shape of a christmas tree which works great outside with a sun that moves through the sky. Yet inside the lights stay in the same place so it unfortunately means that parts of the plant are getting much more light than the others.

Although you can grow great bud this way, it wastes a great deal of the usable light you're paying for. That’s where “Cannabis Training” comes in!

Cannabis training is when growers use established or improvised techniques to alter the natural growth pattern of a marijuana plant, usually to increase efficiency and yields when growing indoors.

There are already many methods available to train your plant, and growers are experimenting with new techniques all the time. In fact, there are so many methods available that many people get confused or intimidated and opt to not try any of them.

But you're not one of those people! Instead, you're reading infomation on how to take advantage of these techniques to get the most out of your cannabis plants!

Below, I’ll give you my cheat notes on some of the most popular methods of training plants. We'll be reviewing:

• LST (Low Stress Training)
• Topping
• Fimming
• Manifolding
• Defoliation

LST (Low Stress Training)

What It Does:
Low Stress Training – or LST – allows growers to change the actual shape of the plant by slowly bending the stems downward in a deliberate fashion. The stems will then grow vertically again, but now they will be better placed to allow light to contact more bud sites.

How To Do It:
Anyone who has done LST will agree that it’s an art in its own right. The basics are to use twistie-tie, twine, or something similar to tie to a stem. Next, the other end of the twistie-tie/twine/etc. is anchored in such a way as to bend the stem downward. This can be accomplished by tying the twine/etc. to the pot/bucket the plant is growing in. The stems are meant to be pulled away from each other to maximize growing space. Think of spreading out the stems from the middle like a star. LST is most effective when done in combination with topping, fimming or other training methods that break apical dominance (the tendency to grow in a christmas tree shape)

Who Should Try This?
Indoor growers of all skill levels can and should try LST. If you're doing a small grow or just trying to maximize on your indoor grow lights, LST will become a must after you've tried it once!

Pros:

• Drastically increases yields when done correctly
• Manages height of plants; makes shorter plants with more buds!
• Makes much more effective use of lights
• Works amazingly with topping/fimming

Cons:

• Growers can snap stems by bending too much at one time, or by trying to bend woody older stems instead of flexible new growth. If you ever snap a stem, tape it up immediately and it will heal!
• Can take more time than some other training methods since plants will likely need to be LST’d multiple times (per branch)

Learn more about LST

Topping

What It Does:
Topping is a method used to essentially force the cannabis plant to have two slightly smaller main colas instead of the single normal one. Main colas almost always have the highest concentration of buds (by weight), so yields are noticeably increased by making two of them, even if nothing else is done besides topping.

How To Do It:
Not only is Topping easy to do, but it only takes seconds and is totally done afterwards. To top your plant, you’ll need to wait until it grows at least 3 to 5 nodes. To finishing topping, simply cut off the newest node right above the leaves of the node below. You can also cut down further on the plant if you need to make it shorter.

Who Should Try This?
Like LST, topping is a great starter training technique and can be attempted by growers of all skill ranges. I would suggest topping after you've grown a single plant (just to see how it works), but you can try it on your first plant if you're the adventurous type!

Pros:

• Super easy to do
• Increases yields by a noticeable amount
• One cut; do it once and it’s done!
• Works amazingly with LST

Cons:

• Can be intimidating to cut off the top of a plant

Read more about topping

Fimming

What It Does:

Fimming is like topping in that it forces the plant to grow extra colas. However, while topping will make the plant to grow two main colas, fimming usually creates 4.

How To Do It:

As with topping, a grower should wait until their plant has at least 3 to 5 nodes before going through with fimming. When ready to fim your plant, firmly pinch the leaves of the newest growth between your index finger and thumb. You can also cut the new growth instead of pinching it. See the picture to the below for a detailed look.

Who Should Try This?
Fimming can be tried by all growers as nothing really happens if it isn't done correctly. Go for it!

Pros:

• Super easy to do – you can't really mess this one up
• Noticeable increase to yields
• Works extremely well with LST
• Pinch it once, and the work is all done

Cons:

• None! In the worst case (if not fimmed correctly), you’ll have a plant with a few weird looking leaves that still function.

Learn more about FIMing

Manifolding

What It Does:
Manifolding is a modified way of topping a plant multiple times to get it to distribute energy equally to all nodes. When done correctly, all remaining branches will get a equivalent amount of energy from the roots, and as such, grow to a similar size. The point of manifolding is to create 8 symmetrical main colas.

How To Do It:
Before attempting mainlining, growers should be very comfortable with topping as it involves topping the same plant multiple times. Below is the abridged version of how to mainline a plant.

Please note that these steps are just to get you acquainted with what’s involved in mainlining, these are not complete steps!

1. Wait for the plant to grow 6 nodes.
2. Top to 3rd node and remove extra growth
3. Let each new cola grow 2-4 nodes
4. Top to the 1st or 3rd node (whichever is more symmetric)
5. Let the new colas grow 3 nodes
6. Top to the 2nd node

At this point the plant will have 8 symmetrical colas.

Who Should Try This?
Manifolding is definitely an advanced technique, and we'd strongly advise growers to only try manifolding when they're very comfortable with growing plants. Manifolding can work in most mediums, but it shines brightest in hydroponics since the recovery time is dramatically shortened. It is not a good technique for small plants, since the plant needs to be at least a few feet tall to get the benefits of manifolding.

Pros:

• Equal distribution of energy makes for a hearty, good looking plant
• No small, larfy buds. All energy goes into long, huge colas
• Makes for efficient use of growing light
• Very noticeable increase in yields when performed correctly

Cons:

• Time consuming
• Involves lots of cutting on the plant (topping) which will increase total grow time
• Doesn’t work with fimming
• Not good for small plants – plants should be able to grow to at least a few feet tall after being manifolded in order to take advantage of the 8 colas (otherwise it's probably a waste of time)
• Not for beginners!

Read more about manifolding

Defoliation

What It Does:
Defoliation is a controversial technique that involves removing fan leaves to increase energy spent on bud sites. Defoliation is also thought to limit the amount that a plant will grow vertically.

How To Do It:
To defoliate a plant, a grower would use their hands or scissors to remove fan leaves from the plant. These are the leaves that grow right under the bud site and have a long stem with just a single fan leaf on it. It's important to note that this is typically done early in the flowering stage, and only on healthy plants with an abundance of light.

Who Should Try This?
This is another advanced technique, so you should only try it if growing cannabis feels easy, but you want to get more out of your grows. Growers who want to defoliate should be in early flowering (though it can be done in veg for height control) and using lights with enough power to penetrate to far into the canopy once the big fan leaves are gone.

Pros:

• Easy to do.
• Higher yields (more light to more bud sites = more bud)
• Creates more space between branches for bud sites to capitalize on.
• Tends to shorten the overall height of plants.
• Decreases chances of White Powdery Mold

Cons:

• A bit scary/dangerous; one wrong cut can remove future buds
• Defoliating gives you less room for error, and any deficiencies will hit bud sites first
• Some growers claim defoliation actually stunts plant growth instead of helping
• Sirius: I picked up defoliation after Nebula covered an article about its benefits. Since then, I defoliate in every grow and I’d definitely stand behind it as a valid way to increase efficiency and yields when done right.

Read more about cannabis defoliation

Even though we’ve gone through all these training methods, there are still more techniques to train your marijuana plants. In fact, there are two that are VERY popular that were skipped to keep this article from getting too lengthy.

If you want to find out more about them, check out our articles on:

ScrOG (Screen of Green)

and Super Cropping

Jump to…

LST (Low Stress Training) – How to Grow a Short Sativa or Haze

Topping & FIMing

Nebula's Manifold Tutorial – Main-lining Cannabis

Cannabis Defoliation: Removing Leaves to Increase Yields

The post Quick Guide to Marijuana Training Techniques appeared first on Grow Weed Easy.

"Main-Lining"

The act of training a marijuana plant to form a "hub" off a single node, creating a "manifold" for equal energy distribution from the roots to each cola.

The result is an even canopy and bigger yields with little extra effort.

Main-lining was originally developed for growing marijuana plants from seed, but has been adapted to be used with marijuana clones.

Note: This article teaches how to use the "main-lining" technique on marijuana clones. This technique is slightly different when starting from seed.

Read the complete article on Main-Lining here:
(including starting from seed)

https://www.growweedeasy.com/mainlining

Notes by Nugbuckets: Main-Lining Marijuana Clones

I have found with clones that building a proper manifold adds an average of 10-21 days onto the total vegetative cycle. I average about 14 days to main-line clones.

The more you Main-Line, the more you will learn exactly when the plant is ready to be pruned and bonded. A grower must watch the plant very closely for her to tell you when she is ready to be pushed.

Newbie growers don't really have this down yet, and it translates into added veg time. Also, clones take longer than growing from seed. Period.

I highly recommend starting out with a marijuana plant from seed. They are genetically programmed to build a strong root mass out of the gate, (which is critical when it comes to how quickly the young plant will recover from main-lining / pruning / bonding)

During early vegatative growth, a clone is a bit more tempermental than a seedling.

Note: This article teaches how to use main-lining on marijuana clones. The technique is slightly different when starting from seed. Read the complete article on Main-Lining here (including starting from seed): https://www.growweedeasy.com/mainlining

When main-lining clones, your goal is to create a central "hub" or manifold for your plant to distribute energy to each of the colas.

Your Goal When Main-Lining Clones

Main-lining with clones is not as neat as main-lining plants grown from seed. When using clones, your final main-lined trunk will look something like this.

Main-lined hub of marijuana clone
(this is what you're creating in this tutorial)

Main-Lined hub of another marijuana clone
(this clone was grown bigger, with 16 colas, so the hub is more "spread out")

Step 1: Start With a Healthy Clone

Any clone will work, but symmetry is key.

You will get the best results using clones which were taken very early off the mother plant, when she is still growing in a symmetrical pattern.

These clones are still growing symmetrically, and are perfect candidates for main-lining. These clones will likely need to be topped in order to be main-lined.

If clones are taken from an older mother plant, they are more likely to display an non-symetrical growing pattern (the sets of leaves don't grow exactly opposite from each other).

This makes it harder to main-line, because the central part of main-lining is allowing all colas to originate from a single node.

In the picture below, notice how the clone is not symmetrical. The growth is slightly lopsided, and the branches do not start at the exact same place on the trunk. This is a common growth pattern among clones taken from older mothers. Click the pic for a close-up!

(Click for closup)

This is typical behavior for clones, and you will have to compensate for this difference as explained in the steps below.

With clones, you have to look at it this way: when there is in an asymmetrical trunk, the top branch or "leader" will always be dominant over any of the node growth below it.

So when main-lining clones, it is mostly a matter of swaying the dominance away from the main cola until one of the chosen lower leaders catches up to it in vigor and stem diameter.

Fixing the asymmetry is done with a pretty radical pinch/bend/bond of the main.

Look at all bonding, pinching, and pruning as a form of suppression, and use that to your advantage.

How old and how tall should clones be when you start the main-lining process?

It depends on how fast your clones are growing. I started on this clone at day 10, when she was about 7.5 inches tall (picture of plant above with ruler).

It can be easy to get caught up with the details, but the most important thing to remember is that you are trying to fix an assymetrical axial branching pattern. You want to make things symmetrical again to equalize energy distribution.

The age of the clone doesn't matter nearly as much as starting with a healthy clone that has a few sets of leaves. Then the idea is to manipulate the plant so two main branches come off the main trunk. These branches should be as close together and symmetrical as possible, and you can use pinching and other gentle manipulation to try to even things out if you notice that one sides seems to be dominant over the other.

Here are the steps you need to follow.
 

Step 2: Top Clone (If Needed – Details Below)

Some nodes naturally grow with two main colas, like this clone right here. If that's the case, you can skip this step.

Skip this step if your clone looks like this
(already has two main colas/new growth tips)

If you are starting with a clone that has grown out several nodes, like the one pictured below, you will need to choose which node you want to become your main hub.

Just choose any node with two healthy branches/new growth tips on either side which are relatively close together.

Then cut off everything above that growth (top the clone to your chosen node).

Leave the fan leaves directly underneath your new node. You will be cutting these off later, but she needs to keep leaves for extra energy right now.

Step 3: Correct Asymmetry in Your Clone with a Pinch/Bend (If Needed)

Because clones often do not grow with good symmetry, you will need to fix any non-symmetry so you have a hub that distributes energy evenly to all the colas.

If your clone is already growing with perfect symmetry, skip this step.

Take a look at the picture below of a clone which does not have perfect symmetry in the two main colas.

Before
(not symmetrical)

Notice how on the clone's meristem, the left side is higher up and bigger. This means that this side is currently dominant. This dominance must be suppressed to equalize the hub and get the benefits of main-lining.

I use a light pinch and bend to equalize the two sides. Look at the first bend in the picture below; you may be able to see my fingernail marks from the pinch/bend.

Try not to tear or damage the cambium layer (the layer of inner bark) or allow the stem to split. Learn more about proper bending in this article about supercropping.

After
(pinch/bend to correct non-symmetry)

Any injury you create to a plant will take a bit of time to heal.

The more you break or tear your plant, the longer it will take to heal and get back into the swing of things, but even if you make a mistake, you'll usually be okay as long as you tape up your plants (and split them as needed for big injuries) and give them some time to recover.

You may also notice that that I left all the vegetation above the hub for now. A young clone like this needs all the energy she can get to continue building a substantial and healthy root system.

Remember: Clones often have weaker root systems compared to similarly sized plants grown from seeds. Therefore when main-lining clones, you must take extra care to reduce stress and give that root system time to develop.

Sneak peak: This is what the clone looks like after it's grown out after this step. Notice how the two branches are growing more evenly. That is the main point of the pinch/bend.

In a few days, we will top or prune clone again for 4 total colas, and then clean up some of this extra vegetation once we can see she is growing vigorously.
 

Step 4: Tie Down Your Mains (Keeping Bends At The Same Level on Both Sides)

If your plant was damaged during any of the previous steps, or if you're worried she needs time to recover, you may want to wait a few days until your clone is growing out its two main colas.

This is a matter of expertise. As a beginner, it's better to err on the side of waiting too long. If you have a lot of experience training/bending clones, then you may be more aggressive.

If you're unsure, wait until you see that your clone is growing healthfully. At that point it's time to top or prune again.

I gave this clone a few days to grow out her two main colas before I started this step.

Just to give you an idea, this is what my clone looked like right before I tied her down.

Before

Notice how I left all her extra vegetation. I will be removing this extra growth later, but I leave it on for now to help power the growing root mass.

Important: Tie Down Colas to Form 90 Degree Angle With Trunk & Keep Bends At The Same Level on Both Sides

You will want to use some slight bending/training/bondage to spread out your colas so they leave the main trunk at a 90 degree angle.

Make sure the bends are at the same level. This is very important! This picture of a different clone better shows off what I mean by trying to keep the bends at the same level:

You can use a variety of methods, including gardening wire, coat hangers, almost anything to tie down your plants.

Just avoid using anything too thin or sharp, like string, as it can cut into your plants. This type of training, where you tie down and manipulate the plant, is called LST (low stress training).

Here's a close-up of one of the types of ties I use to hold the plants down. It's just bendy gardening wire. You can also see the two growth tips at the end which will become two new colas.

Step 5: After Clone Has Recovered, Top or Prune To Produce 4 Colas (remove all growth tips except for 4 mains)

The point of this step is to remove all the growth tips except for 4 chosen mains.

I generally will do this 2-5 days after whatever training I've done until now. Sometimes your clone may need a little bit longer if she's growing slowly, if she had an injury, or if she didn't respond well to the training you've done so far.

The most important thing is to make sure that the plant is still growing happy and healthy before topping or pruning for 4.

Basically you want to make sure there are two main growing tips left at the end of each of your two main colas. You can either top the clone, or just choose two growth tips that are close together and remove all the other growth.

Topping produces more symmetrical growth, but adds extra time. I will usually chose 4 mains and use a pinch/bend to correct asymmetry because I am on a fast schedule. Any way you produce 4 symmetrical mains will work.

Don't prune unnecessary fan leaves yet! Just remove the growth tips besides your 4 mains. Make sure that each of your 4 main colas has a nice big fan leaf underneath to power the growth of those colas.

Remove all growing tips except 2 symmetrical growth tips on each side. Remove extra fan leaves and vegetation below the main splits. This picture will show you the 4 mains, and where the main splits are located.

Tie down your 4 new mains.

Your clone should now look like this

Notice how I've taken all 4 colas and tried to spread them out.

In the best case scenario, you want to train this "hub" of your plant to have lots of right angles, while being as flat as possible, so all the colas will end up having lots of room between them to grow fat and get lots of light.

Here's a closeup of the wire ties I used to hold the 4 new main colas down. I bent thick copper wire into a hook and just hooked it gently around the 4 colas of the plant. You can use just about anything to tie the cola down as long as it's thick enough and doesn't cut into the plant. (For example, don't use string).

You can see lots of new growth tips already on each main. In a few days, you will choose 2 of these to become 2 new colas, when you prune for 8.
 

Step 6: After Clone Has Recovered, Top or Prune Again For 8 Colas

I generally wait about 2 days after the last step. You may need to wait a little longer if it seems like your plant is struggling. If she's growing fast and healthy for a day or two, then you know she's ready to be topped or pruned again.

Here's what my clone looked like after being topped/pruned for 8:

In the picture above, you can see I trimmed each of the main colas so it only has two remaining growth tips. Sometimes it's easier to top, and sometimes you have two tips that you can manipulate into two new colas. The most important thng is to have 8 growth tips remaining, 2 on each of your previous 4 colas.

In this case, there were two suitable colas at the end of each main branch, and so I just needed to prune the growth below the two mains. When you can avoid topping the plant, it will save you a lot of time in the vegetative stage. However, when topping the plant, you tend to get more even growth without the need for a pinch/bend. It's up to you to decide exactly how you want to do it.

It's normal for plant growth to slow down a bit after being pruned or topped for 8 colas.

Step 7: Prune for 16, 32 Or More (If Desired)

If you would like to top or prune again for a total of 16 colas (or one more time after that for 32), then just make sure you give the plant enough time to pick her stride back up before each additional pruning.

This quick guide may help you decide:

You're Pretty Much Done! Now You Just Watch The Plant And Use LST and Supercropping to Keep Her Short If Any Colas Start Getting Too Tall.

All of your effort is worth it because you have built the perfect structure to power your plant's growth from now on. After this point, you pretty much just get to enjoy the fruits of your labor…

Here's this same clone 8 days later, so you can see what she looks like after she starts hitting her stride again. At this point, this clone is 23 days from rooting.

8 Days Later – Clone is now 23 Days From Root

People often ask how tall? She's just under 10" in height.

Here's that same clone again 5 days later. I still haven't done anything but let her grow out. The main-lining is doing all the work for me to produce the desired growing pattern.

Want more examples?

Topping vs Pruning: Cloning Question Answered By Nugbuckets

Question: What really peaked my interest with main-lining was the total plant growth through 1 node.

Now I can see plants from seed would work great, but with clones, do you still find that there is a difference in growth between the 2 sides?

I've got a couple of 2nd gen clones I'd like to mainline. #1 looks like a good candidate for this project, #2 has some nodal gap, will this one work??

#1 – top clone of plant grown from seed – less than a month since cutting

I circled the node I was planning on building the hub off of

#2 – Top clone of a different plant grown from seed – less than a month since cutting – this girl has already been topped just to slow down her speedy growth.

Can I use the circled node even with this big space between nodes?

I topped above the node above the circled one, would I be better off using the current top node or the one I originally circled above?

Answer by Nugbuckets

They all look good. You've definitely got the right idea.

With a clone, try to top near the tip where you have two nodes close together, then let those grow out a bit.

Those will become your two mains.

That way you dictate the stretch, or lack thereof, in the hub.

Continue to full article on main-lining:

https://www.growweedeasy.com/mainlining

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