Low Stress Training: Are your Plants in Shape?

The shape of your plants is super important. It can turn a humble harvest into a bumper crop.

Want to get plants in shape? All it takes is a little topping, netting and bending - in that order!

It’s basically removing the tip of your plant. This stops it growing tall and makes it grow bushy.

You do this in late propagation and/or early vegetative growth.

Instead of growing a tall Christmas tree, you’ll grow a shorter, wider plant with lots of branches. It's the perfect shape for growing plants under lights. You get lots of manageable sized flowers, instead of a few big ones. Overall, your yield is higher.

• From cuttings, pinch the top off the plant when it has around 4 nodes
• Use your fingernails or a sharp pair of scissors
• Space branches out, so they grow away from other branches and your canopy stays flat

It’s where you spread your plant's branches out under a horizontal net to create a flat, level canopy.

Plants use the light more effectively - as a result, your yield increases.

Plants are also shorter, which is great if you don’t have much headroom, and they’ll be very well supported.

• Position crop support netting horizontally across your tent/room.
  
  
• Attach it to tent poles or make a wooden frame
  
  
• Move branches away from the centre of your plant and tuck under the net
  
  
• As the tips grow vertically through the net, pull the branches down and tuck through the next hole in the net
  
  
• Aim to have a one branch growing through each hole in the net

Elastic Crop Support Netting is great for grow tents, and is very easy to install.

This is where you bend tall growing stems so they grow in different directions.

To direct them away from intense light, or away from another stem or flowering site.

Use plant support yo-yo’s or soft twist wire to move stems to another area.

You can gently manipulate the direction of growth by using Stemz. They create curves in soft branches.