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Search for a ressource in our libraryHey guys and welcome (back) to Free The Tree!
This week is pretty weird. On one hand we’ve got 2 plants that are growing real quickly (the 2 BBC’s) and 2 plants growing reeeal slow (cheese and Blue Thai). We’re already trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with the different sizes in time in order to avoid issues during the flowering.
That said, in this post well go over the plant training that we did in order to prepare for the SCROG, as well as the reasons why these two little one’s have been growing slowly.
Let’s get into it!
Training Marijuana Plants for ScrOG
Setting up your ScrOG is something you need to prepare for pretty early on in the life of your little one. I’m not saying that you can’t decide later on, but the best moment to start training your plant is at the 3rd stage of leaves.
Little pointer before we get into it, we won’t have the last step on the training since it takes a little more than a week to grow. The last step will be in our next post 😉
Training Weed for a Scrog Easily
So we’re going to go through each step in order to train your Marijuana for a scrog.
As a reminder, these are the steps before setting up your screen. If you want to go to the screen set-up check out our ScrOG guide.
The first picture will show the plant just before we started to train her, after which we’ll get into each step.
Plant 1 – Young Blue Kush Weed Plant
You want to wait until the 3rd stage of leaves before doing anything. In the picture above we must wait a little before starting to train this one.
Step 1 – Pruning the Apex
Once your plant has grown her 3rd stage you’re going to want to cut (prune) the top section of the plant with a pair of clean scissors or a blade.
As we show in the picture below, you’ll want to do this just above the knot, be careful not to damage the side branches that are forming!
In the next step you will be able to see what it the plant will look like without the Apex. If you’re worried about the fact that the Apex is supposed to be her strongest and best bud, don’t worry, you’ll get that bud x10 😉
Step 2 – Let the 2 new Branches Grow
After cutting the Apex you’re going to want to wait until each side branch has developed a new stage of leaves.
Step 3 – Prune Tip of the 2 new branches
Now as you can see we waited a little too long to cut the tip of the side branches. Generally you’d want to cut it before the growth of the next stage in order to avoid any waste of energy. With that in mind, we’re still going to keep the 1st stage branches, in time we’ll prune the 2nd stage growths and that top leaf that’s shading the branch.
Step 4 – Let the new sets of branches grow
Once you reached this stage you’re going to wait a little until those 4 branches have grown enough to start training them. As you can see above, at this point in time they’re way to small to start doing so. We need to wait a couple days, so the second half of this section will be on the next post 😉
Slow Growth during the early Vegetative Stage
As we started saying in the beginning of the article, 2 out of the 3 plants originating from the germinated seeds have been growing really slowly, especially compared to the third.
After reading left and right, this is due to the fact that we planted them straight into the final pot, whereas the other plant was in a small pot before being transplanted into the final one.
We didn’t know this at first, but a weed plant in that it in a pot that’s too big for it will grow much slower since it’s focusing on root development. This means that the root system will be well developed, but there’s definitely some time lost.
Here’s a couple picture of the growth during this week.
Normal Growth – Blue Kush planted in small pot than transplanted to larger pots.
Slow Growth – Blue Thai and Cheese planted straight into the large pots.
Just with these 2 pictures you can easily see the huge difference. Keep in mind that these seeds germinated at about the same time! (couple days delay for the Cheese plant on the far right).
Crazy how big of a difference in growth there is no? Thankfully this week the 2 slower plants started getting there growing on, but they’ll never catch up the other plants.
As we said earlier, the reason for this is the fact that a marijuana plant that’s planted in a large pot will grow slower during the early vegetative stage.
On the upside, these plants won’t have any transplanting stress and once the root system is well developed they’ll get growing strongly.
Blue Thai – Apex just pruned for ScrOG preperation
Cheese plant event smaller – 2nd stage of leaf growing
As you can see in the two images above, by the end of the second week they had grown “a lot”. The Blue Thai had grown the 3rd level of leaves so we decided to cut the Apex on this one.
On her side, the Cheese is still hanging back. We decided to cut all new side branches in order for her to focus on vertical growth.
I’m not too sure what we’re going to do with her, if she catches up we might do a small scrog, or else we’ll just keep a couple side branches and work her more when we get into the re-vegetation cycle (spoiler ^^).
Before we let you go, here’s a couple last pictures of them at the end of week 5, as always click on them to see the full picture.
Hopefully these 2 little ones are going to get their grow on.. Next week we plant to make the cutting of the Blue Kush for a friend and place the screen, so they need to hurry up ^^
Alright Folks, that’s it for this one.
Until next time, be safe and grow easy!
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