So I have this thing that sometimes happen when I put my plants into flower. I understand some genetics will have more propensity to side branch during the stretch phase but sometimes it is just ridiculous.
I’ll take clones and generally top them once and give myself say 6-8 main branches. I grow these out quite large and veg them for a couple of months. Then I squash them under a net and once they look recovered I put them into flower (kind of a dirty scrog, I basically flip when the screen is full and all tops turned upwards)
Often times during stretch the main tops and the nodes thay start growing up from the net will just kind of go mental and create countless side branches like and I end up with way too many small “tops” that generally turn into a less than ideal yield. What causes this to happen? Are the plants too crowded? Is it a temp/humidity thing?
I grow a few GG4 hybrids/crosses and this seems to be the case.
However this time I was determined to lollipop as hard as I could and concentrate growth into main colas and did fhe best I could with some success, however I noted up the end of the tent where the dehumidifier is the plants seemed to behave much more favourably verses the other end of the tent where the exhaust filter is. Despite the humidity/temp seeming to be relatively uniform at both ends (have 2 humidistats, one at each end) . The opposite end of the tent was OK but definitely not as dense and prolific colas as the other end, same cut, same strain. Wonder if anyone has any insight. Am I better to not squash the branches down and just flip them to flower and train them up and out as they stretch instead?
The only thing that’s confusing is the first time I run these strains from seed I do everything exactly the same and they perform fine, then some clone runs they just do this out of control side branching. One grow was so bad I had nothing to really trim by hand and I had to trim the entire grow by machine because it was just all popcorn on millions of tiny branches
