One thing I always recommend to growers, especially new ones is to not be timid with the plant. You would be amazed at what this plant can take. Its called "weed" for a reason. Your plants actually grow stronger from stimulation and training. Your plant starts out as a wet noodle really. Its up to mother nature...or if you grow indoors "You" for the stimulation it needs to get strong.
Lots of ways to replicate mother nature in your tent. Take that seedling everyone loves to coddle for example. Know what I do to mine? I grow in solo cups to start out with....so I shake it. Start out slow and gentle and observe how she sways and then increase your tempo. You are simulating wind. The plant, like a person, only gets stronger when it is stimulated or stressed and then the plant, or in our cases its our muscles, get stronger in a means to protect itself from that sort of stress/stimulation.
So what then? You have to keep pushing the plant. Again I understand the apprehension in doing it...but if you think about plants similar to people in the manner I used it above, you can see how that sort of training/simulation/stress needs to happen. But I can assure you that if you don't these sorts of things, your plants are going to be far weaker than if you did nothing to them.
Can you still grow good plants by doing nothing? Sure! People do it all the time with good genetics. But not every plant is a superstar. We can help ourselves a lot by doing just little things (shaking plants when they are young and through out growth). I still shake my medium and large plants through most of their like...certainly all the way through the stretch. If I did everything correctly, and the genetics allow it, most of the plants are strong enough to support itself with only a bambo stake on the bigger colas. Some strains, sativas specifically, are just going to struggle to support themselves indoors throughout the grows.
Additional training like topping, mainlining, quadlining, Scrog, supercropping, etc, will all lead to stronger plants and when done correctly (and all other factors are equal) will generally lead to larger yields as well. But I would be remiss if I didn't stress ROOTS, ROOTS, ROOTS above all else as what should be your top priority in veg (training comes when you start getting great roots) especially if you are growing in soil.
I know it is long winded...but the ultimate point is push yourself as a grower (if you are all interested in that sort of thing...I know I like to push myself at anything I do, I always want to get better) which sometimes means stepping out of our comfort zone, and push the plants we are growing (at least to the point you have a good idea of what she is capable of handling). Then you can kind of find your comfort zone. Many growers on here were scared to top their first plants. Took some convincing to get them to even attempt it Now they love training plants out beyond what they ever thought possible for themselves.
I don't like to go crazy on every plant I grow. Sometimes I just want to let one go naturally or maybe top once and let her go. Now when I see a plant with specific structure, I have a good idea what I want to do with her training wise and how I want to see her grow out. Again these are amazingly resilient plants. I had a week old rooted clone that I dropped my cell phone one (hit edge first) and broke the clone in two places, somehow the breaks were in successive nodes but going the opposite direct (think of a Z shape break). I have no idea how it managed to break that way....but I never throw a plant away without giving it a fighting chance (not sure if you are familiar with Jerry Clower...hes an older southern comedian...but I adopted it from him). I took a 10" bamboo skewer and managed to somehow prop the plant back up with enough pressure on both breaks to be stable and look like it might have a shot at healing. That was back in August. That plant is just now finally hitting its stride (I had plenty of room so it wasn't a big deal to have it just sit in a corner and slowly heal itself. That plants main structure is looking awesome despite her accident. Like I said before, you will be amazed at what these plants are capable of taking from us (or mother nature...how do you think trees stand those wind gusts they do!). Sorry for the long winded reply (I blame the big bowl I smoked 5 minutes before I sat down to respond) LOL..
Have a great Friday with the wife Mo!
