top, top, top, TOP, TOP, TOP
Top your plants off, top your plants off! (To the tune of "Shake Your Booty") Well the time has come where I need to chop the top off my precious little plants. It's nerve-wracking going at your newly sprouted plants with scissors, but I'm determined to maximize my yield and create a perfect SCROG (Screen of Green) and the first step to getting a good SCROG is the process of topping. From my online research the concept behind topping is this; a plant left to it's own devices grows like a Christmas tree, with none of the lower branches ever surpassing the tallest dominant cola. While letting the plant grow naturally does create one large cola of buds, you can get more, so what's better than one cola? Many cola's! This is where topping comes in, you pretty much chop the top off the plant just above the second or third node, leaving the little baby leaves that are growing in the nook between the nodes. Once you chop the top it tells the plant that these two new "main branches" are the dominant ones. After the plant recovers from the trauma you can top again, and then again, keeping in mind each time you do it the volume of buds on each cola decreases slightly. Well here goes nothing, I chopped the tops off three of the four plants, one of the girls is a little underdeveloped so I'm going to give her a little more time. I'll let you know how they fare after a few sleepless nights.
