Growing Tips
Learn to listen to your plants.
Canopy control - how to manage your plants height.
Learn to listen to your plants.
Plants cant talk, obviously, but what they can do is show there health or illness through body language. This helps us communicate with plants and understand their well being.
A happy plant has a deep green appearence with no discolouration, leaves that reach out for the sun and white roots that are drinking and feeding like there's no tomorrow. A plant that looks like this is telling you its healthy. Its healthy plants like this that give you the urge to push them to the limits. However a plant will also tell you if its not happy. For example, if it is recieving too much water, its leaves will droop, and if you give it too much food it will burn the leaves. Heat can also stress plants out.
So study your plants, get to know them, learn what they look like when they want something, and learn how to give it to them. This way you get the harvest you want.
Canopy control - how to manage your plants height.
When growing plants indoors you must be in full control of the garden. Do not let the plants control you. When all their needs are met plants can grow very quickly and can, if you let them, get out of hand. As the plants grow you must choose a height your happy with, and anything that grows above this needs to be controlled. This is called canopy control.
In the first few weeks of flowering the plants grow and grow fast. It takes about two weeks of flowering for the plants to fully realise the change in light. This is the time when you need to make sure you are in control of the plants heights.
You can pinch the growing tip out of the plants, known as topping, which redistributes the plants hormones and encourages the lower branches to grow to replace what was taken off.
Supercropping is also a popular technique, you gently crush the inside of the stem and bend it over. Generally you do this to the top of the plant which gives the same result as topping apart from the fact that the you don't remove any parts just slow their growth. Supercropping can lead to an even canopy as while the top shoot is recovering the side branches will grow up to meet it, and you can supercrop as often as you need too during vegetative growth and early flowering.
Plants can also be bent over to give them a lower height and more side growth. A piece of string or a Yoyo plant supports are used to hold the top of the plant down to the ground, turning it into a horizontal stem, which minimizes height. This is known as LST or low stress training.
The name of the game in indoor growing is to keep the lights as close as possible to your plants, an even canopy makes this possible.