Northern Lights
Day 35
New Years Eve Special!!!
Happy NYE everyone! Morning
@rehabilitatora420! Like I told you, we are in prime time now for training and at that stage where everything moves fast. Learn to enjoy it, cuz when you’re watching paint dry later you’ll wish you had something to do. Lmao! Anyway, today it was time to do a couple things:
1.
Release her bonds. What I did was remove every stake except the ones holding the top two nodes flat. The branches have all been held in place long enough to maintain their positions when released, and now that we are about to stretch, we want her to be as free as possible. We will train through the stretch, but it’s mostly to even out the ring. What we want now, since we have established our 10-cola base and have a flat canopy, is VERTICAL growth. Let them go up! As they do, you can spread them a bit or even them out a bit or whatever is necessary to keep the canopy flat, but now that should be minimal adjustments.
What we did was what I feel you must do with autos:
get the training established ASAP!!!! It’s a huge advantage in terms of yield. The reason is,
when you get the training done before the stretch, like we have pretty much done here, you then have the freedoms to let the stretch do what it’s supposed to do. STRETCH. Why does the plant stretch? Lots of hormonal answers and such, but the plant stretches because when it does, the branches develop more nodes. More nodes = more buds. More buds = the plant has a better chance of catching pollen. This is what it genetically wants badly to do. So what that means is,
longer stems = more bud = more yield. So we release them now. Maintain evenness and flatness as we go, and let her stretch. See how big she’ll get! Also as we go we will decide what to get rid of or keep, but that is after the new year. So that’s why I released them today. If we had NOT gotten the training done as early as we did, we would then have to waste valuable stretch time in training horizontally, thus robbing ourselves of vertical growth. Understand?
Here’s how nice and flat we are now:
And here’s how spread and even the canopy is from above, where it’s pretty clear what we have to do to even it out. Easy from here.
2.
Notice how open the middle is now? That’s because it was time to take a few leaves off and open her up. So here’s the thing: everyone defoliates differently and in their own way they’re comfortable with. There are many schools of thought. At this point I feel that the goal is take as close to ZERO leaves as possible the entire grow. You need the leaves! They are your engines!
But, we also have to open up the middle and see what’s going on. So today I took four leaves. They were the ones in the middle that were keeping us from seeing inside. Here’s a closeup to show you better:
And here’s two pictures with arrows to show you where I took those leaves from. They were the smaller inside leaves that were blocking the entire middle. See?
3. Lastly, here’s a pretty good picture that tells the story after the above work is done. This is fricking sweet. This is a pretty good target, generally speaking, for a plant trained in this manner. Go for something in this vein.
I hope you and yours have a great new year, as well as anyone suffering through this endless, boring tutorial. Lmao!!!
How cool is that? The second picture is the LEDs inside the microscope sleeve. As you can see, this is the reason for those reflections. But boy does it look cool.
