To train or top

I am on second week of white widow grow and want to train them but I have read that if they are feminized that I should not top them , maybe do scrog and not trim tops .

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I think you might be confusing fems with autos. Go ahead and top them, bend them, how ever ypu want to train them. They are still photoperiods if they are just fems so you control when they flower. If they are autos, thats a different story.

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Like @Grohio said, you can top and train them even if they are feminized. Also, you can top and train fem-auto strains as well. I believe you can get a lot out of a fem auto by topping it once and training it with low stress training but some autos do stay small so can be different approach to how the specific strains grow and how you want to grow them.

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As has been said above - if they are photo’s, then chop, bend or what ever. I am a huge fan of growing under a scrog screen using LST - just force them to grow sideways and they will keep throwing out new branches - that you can also force to grow sideways and they too will throw out more new branches, etc etc. You can keep that up well into flowering if you want a million colas to fill up a tent.

Autos can also be trained. LST is safest, but you can top if you want. Just keep in mind - with autos you only have a fixed time to grow. They will not wait around while you fiddle. They keep marching to maturity no matter what you do. However - every time you stress them they pause in their development and growth, so the more you top, the slower they grow.

I am new to autos, but I have had great success topping one time early on, then just LST under the scrog screen after that. I continue the LST well into flowering.

My first auto grow I harvested close to 3000 grams (wet) from just three plants. That was even with several major screw ups, so you can get great yields using LST and scrog.

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Did you mean to say 300 grams?

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That was not a typo. Final wet weight was 2937 grams. I didnt dry it because I decided to try making dry ice hash from the wet bud. That turned out to be a pretty bad idea.

I normally end up with somewhere between 25% and 28% final weight when dried, so this was roughly equal to somewhere between 735 and 820 grams dried… Thats an average of aprox 250 plus grams per plant of dried bud.

These were grown in a 28" x 38" tent, 320 watt LED. I did cheat a little and gave them a huge root chamber - 56 gallons or so, and the grow was air atomized aeroponics or AAA. Offsetting that was the three different times I nearly killed them by forgetting to turn the timers that control the misters back on and all the root severely dried out each time. They recovered every time though.

Im convinced the LST under the scrog screen was a major contributing factor to the yield numbers.

Some pics.


Those are 3" net pots.

More pics and details here if you are interested:

Oh the autos were Ghost Toof #2 x SBR from @ReikoX. An impressive auto for my money.

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