Welcome back to the Big Buddha Cheese series! If you’ve been with us all the way, it’s been a fun but rough ride!
We started with 4 cuttings, only 1 survived, so to maximise the harvest we decided to try our first SCROG ever! on our first plan ever, a bunch of firsts ^^

As you can see, by now we’ve got one nice looking plant, developing a large number of branches.
At this point we really made a huge mistake, which we’re going to cover here so that you don’t make it with your screen of green!

Let’s get going, to recap in this article we’re going to cover:

• SCROG: What nutrients to give your plant during the vegetative stage
• SCROG: What to do during the vegetative stage
• The importance of defoliation

SCROG: What nutrients to give your plant during the vegetative stage

Your plant is going need all the energy she can in order to take over this screen. Now its important to remind this, nutrients are not the source of energy for a plant, light is through photosynthesis, nutrients are only a supplement.
That said, the mix is pretty straight forward as always during the vegetative stage.
Here’s to mix we gave here so that you can adjust your own, as a reminder we also inputed the temperature and humidity levels:

Now remember with nutrients, it’s always better to go lower than over. If you notice Nitrogen deficiencies, just add a little more at your next watering, it’s always easier than dealing with nutrient burn

Ok, now you have you’re plant going on your screen, cool! but what to do? Do you just keep weaving indefinitely? Let her grow as much as she wants until your max is reached? sooo many question, we’re going to try to answer them all!

SCROG: What to do during the vegetative stage

While your Cannabis plant grows you’re going to need to guide her, make sure she doesn’t waste her energy.
On the pictures i’m going to share, you’ll see the example of… basically what not to do. This was our first run, I was thinking “Lets get as much branches, we’ll have a bunch of buds, yay!”, but really this is the worst thing possible.

Here’s what you want to do:

1. Keep weaving the branches that you’ve dedicated to invading the screen.
   While doing so, identify the one’s you’re going to keep out of the one’s that are growing off of your main branches.
   Generally you’ll see 2 branches growing at each knot, I like to keep the top one out of both.
2. Make sure there’s enough room between each branch you’ve chosen.
   I like to have one or two wholes of the screen of distance between each branch so that they have room to grow nice leaves to catch light, without making shade to their neighbour.
3. Cut any branches that are not the one’s you’ve chosen.
4. Cut any leafs that are too low, making shade to your branches or not generating any energy.
   Be careful when cutting top leaves, you want to leave some to the branch in question! She needs to make food too
5.  Keep this process going during the whole vegetative stage

Cutting your branches and leafs in this manner will do 2 things.
The first, it will boost growth in the younger areas of the plant, that have more light exposure.
Secondly, the plant can focus its energy on a couple strong branches instead of spreading it out all over the place. This will give strong branches instead of many weak ones.
You’ll thank me for this when you have a couple nice huge buds instead of a bunch of shy one’s 😉

Now as promised, our free-growing scrog

So full disclosure that last one is during the stretch. But you can see over her life she started growing soooo many branches, at that time I was all excited about it. But really, choose your branches, cut the rest.
For you guys to compare, check out our second run, this time we didn’t hesitate of cutting down what was needed. Look at the difference:

Now you can see on this one that there are less individual branches than our Big Buddha cheese, but these buds are so much bigger than the final render is much bigger this way.

Appart from that look at the difference in size of those leafs!

Before we leave you, we wanted to make a last little part on defoliation and its importance.

The importance of defoliation

So defoliation is the action of cutting leafs and branches off your leafs.

As we’ve seen, when doing a screen of green this is crucial in order to contain and concentrate to growth of the plant. This doesn’t mean using other styles of indoor growing you should defoliate.
During the vegetative stage, you should always defoliate your plants, here are some quick advantages of doing so:

• Your plant will grow faster
• Your plant will grow newer leafs higher up the stem, thus have better access to the light source
• A few dense buds are better than a bunch of buds with hardly no flowers on them
• Your plant will look nicer

Alright that’s it for this one! next time we’ll go over the stretch of this strain, soon you’ll get to see her flowers 😉

Until then, be safe and grow easy