Humboldt Sour Diesel Auto (Humboldt HSC) — Box, Coco, LED

Instead of straight topping, I decided to try something else this time. If the goal to maximize photosynthesis capacity at any stage of a plant's life, then why would I chop off the leaves above the cut line? And why would I cut off extra branches at this stage? Now, for the branches, there could be a reason in that culling weaker or unwanted branches (according to a canopy shaping strategy, if you have one) would stimulate the plant to redirect all energy to expanding main planned cola branches. But if we assume that a sucker branch/unwanted branch is a net-positive energy producer — meaning that it has enough leaf surface to generate more energy that it consumes on whatever processes are going within it — why would I want to rob the plant of this extra energy this early in the lifecycle, where the canopy is nowhere near big enough to properly capture all cast light? The benefits are exponential, so the later I cull extra branches (read, leaves), the more energy (and, as a result, plant mass) the plant had a chance to generate until then. So maybe a good strategy is just clipping unwanted budlings and keeping the rest, including a (bent and guided) central stem. This time I decided to perform what I called "Branch-Stop" on the plant. It probably has a proper name in agriculture, but I had not gotten to researching it. What I did was basically clip any child branches at their origin node if I didn't want the plant to continue growing in that direction/area. At the same time I kept the leaves at the same node junctions, where it was physically possible to separate them. To give you an easy to understand example, if my plant was on [central stem] node 7 and I would normally top above node 4, this time I would clip all child branches above node 4, but I will keep the leaves, recursively. Effectively, I would top a lot of young-generation nodes. A logical continuation of this idea is to not top any branches at all, just make sure that no unwanted bud sites are allowed to develop, to limit the number of colas and reduce larf/popcorn. Obviously, this method is risky, at the very least because many cuts means much larger total cut surface, much greater risk of contamination of any kind (including inviting unwanted insects), and probably more stress to the plant. On the other hand, leaf surface loss is negligible, and the plant should have enough energy to recover quickly. This can also be done as a steady repeated procedure, removing only a few tiny young branches at once. I made sure that my instruments were sterile, I used clean gloves and I made sure my environment was also clean. Would not recommend it for outdoor at all (too risky), but indoor it worked better than I expected, in the sense that the plant did not show any signs of stress, and continued growing a massive trunk.