Xlr8's Psychedelic Bloom Party Extravaganza

Xlr8;1677328 said:

wildbill38;1676951 said:

Your plants are nice. I love the strains your growing.
Some my call this training tech something else,
but i and a few others call it Main-Lining.
Go to google and type this in The Main-Lining Thread.
Its perfect for the TGA gear you grow. I dont want to
got into the details cause i cant grow and it sucks.
I dont live in a legal state and have small children living
in the house.
Not worth the hassle. I didnt mean to hijack or
mess your thread up, but I thought you might find main-ling useful.

Click to expand...

Thank you for the tip/suggestion, Wildbill. The technique you are describing is brilliant...

I'm jealous that I didn't think of that, honestly. In many ways it's a nice improvement over what I do now, which is using 2 nodes to create an X shaped frame that the tops grow up from, bushing out the plant. I hope to try this technique you are suggesting in a future grow, as I really like the logic and the exploitation of that knowledge/logic.

To explain a bit more for anyone else interested, without really sending them off-site:

Normally, for example, I'd top a plant in such a way that the growth energy is split between 4 main trunks at the base of the plant. You do this by cutting the top of the plant off above the second true node, once the plant has 6-7 nodes total. The remaining 4 side branches become the new "tops" and can be trained in such a way as to provide multiple colas. This is a good strategy indoors, especially compared to leaving a plant to grow as it would outdoors naturally (which isn't efficient indoors with height/size limitations). The weakness in this strategy is that typically 2 of the branches still end up slightly dominant to the other 2, resulting in cola size differences, etc. Sometimes, I go one level higher, resulting in 6 main branches/tops - but again, it's hard to get them equal in size (if not impossible).

What I do now (NOT mainlining). Jillybean has 6 main trunks (older picture from earlier in the grow):

Vortex has 4 main tops/branches (again, pic taken earlier in the grow):

"Mainlining" would be topping above the 3rd node, then removing the 2 below it. Now, the plants energy is equally distributed to 2 main stems. This is important! Now, these 2 main stems will each get topped similarly a few more times, depending on how many main colas you want.

Because of how it's done, the energy is more equally distributed amongst the branches since it's all coming from one node at the origin point. The energy remains equally distributed to the resulting branch points on either side. Brilliant!

Here's an example I pulled from the web (not my plant) - notice all growth comes from both sides of one node (branching point), resulting in greater symmetry and equal branch size(s):

Here's another very nice example (not mine). Notice how symmetrical things stay if you derive all growth from the same branching point:

One more pic, a grower took after the "chop":

Wildbill, thanks for bringing this technique to my attention. It's got my wheels turning for sure, and makes a lot of sense as a way to exploit the plants natural growth tendencies to our advantage indoors...

Click to expand...