2) Barney's / Wedding Cake Auto / Micro

On Day 7 the plant was moved to the grow tent that the previous grow grew in and had been drying in. LST started as early as Day 9. It always makes me feel a little bad for the youngling. That seed could have happily sprouted in any of countless other pots or fields and grown tall and unaffected with one giant usable cola - the way she's supposed to. But it had the misfortune of being the seed delivered to me - with this setup. With this setup that says, "I have no choice but to dwarf you, one way or the other. You WILL be stressed!" This breaks the record from last grow (Day 11). Getting crueler as I age, I guess. 😂 Why LST so early? 1)A key component of my training strategy is the "constant even canopy" concept. When the plant is presented as a flat surface to the lamp, better things are happening for your grow than otherwise. Therefore, the earlier you start LST, the faster you'll start getting growth of the other 3 main branches, because the plant has been laid flat. Then you just keep compounding your growth outward across that flat plane as much as you can. The sooner you LST, the sooner you kickstart faster/better growth basically. Why waste time (with an auto)? 2)You also get to the point where the main cola loses apical dominance over the rest of the plant quicker, because you allowed for the faster growth of the underlying branches as quickly as you did. 3)It also makes scrogging the plant easier eventually too. 4)Ultimately, the biggest benefit, I think, is you get to keep the main cola without topping, so more juicy yield potentially? And the main cola is usually the most beautiful and yielding, so keep her! (More on this below.) So if you read the Germination story I wrote, you might have come here to see how the off center planting of the seed in the pot affected things with LSTing the plant? Well, I liked the orientation the first grow LST took in that I bent the plant in the direction of the leaves in the first node. In other words, when the plant was bent over, one of the single leaf leaves (1st node above cotys) would be pointing up to sky and the other would pointing directly down into the pot (and I would just remove that hopeless leaf eventually). With this planting off-center, however, I needed to figure out which edge of the pot I wanted to lean the main cola branch over. I decided that the nearest edge to the plant would be best because it would eventually make watering the plant easier than any other orientation. But the only way to do that was to violate the LST orientation that I chose the first grow, because the leaves would be diagonal to the ground instead of perpendicular and parallel. But then I realized that it would be a fun test to see how the plant would handle it. So I went with the diagonal decision. I learned it eventually meant less need to defoliate from the plant because every leaf or stem had the opportunity to turn and face the "sun." In the other way, there's either perfect alignment or a pair where one sibling needs to die - so you lose 25%. Maybe I'll keep doing it this way? It did, however, make controlling the N,S,E,W orientation of the main branches a little harder. You'll see in the next couple weeks that some of the velcro straps on the pot are diagonal on the pot because I literally had to wrangle some of the branches away from where they naturally wanted to go, if I wanted that square look (if viewing from above) I like the plant to have during flower. Anyway, this week is where all the training started. She was not topped. I still have never done that to a plant. I think I might be getting religiously suspicious of the practice. Throw away the BEST cola? Instead of keeping and doing the work to train it? Seems work worth doing to me, if you can swing it. Topping to me seems like trading your best player on your team for draft picks and bench players you plan to turn into starters someday. Needs to be done sometimes I guess? Someday I'll try growing a more Sativa dominant strain that grows taller than these strains I have, and I guess I'll have to try topping then. Have a great grow day! 😬👍