Things are gonna get crazy

I am just just a short time away from switching my lights from 18 hours on and 6 hours off to 12 hours on and 12 hours off. This new light cycle will cause my cannabis to begin flowering.

I am trying to decide if I should begin flower this weekend or possible wait another week. Right now, she is seven weeks old, but I think giving her an extra week of veg will be good for her roots and to continue to spread out across the canopy.

Right now, I am shooting for lots of sideways growth and not really much upwards growth at all. When she begins flower, then I will concentrate on allowing her to grow upwards towards the light.

She is very thick and dense right now, but over the next couple weeks, she will spread out a bit more and all the branches that will be shooting up to the lights are going to be some really nice bud sights that in about 8 weeks, will have some monster sized buds on her. So to prepare for that, I installed the second layer of my netting.

I have really enjoyed having the first layer of netting in a few weeks earlier than I normally do. This has allowed me to focus on bending the branches down while they are easy to bend. This has been good because I am less likely to break any of the branches when they are more pliable. It has been really cool to see this plant spread out at such a low height as compared to when I would normally do this. Plus bending the branches earlier has really helped to thicken everything up on the plant because I am expecting some serious weight on the branches during flower, so I have been doing a lot to prepare the plant for that.

I have been tucking all new growth to keep it under the bottom layer of netting. As the branches spread, they create new branches that need to be bent down.

This new growth is so easy to manage and move to where I want it to go. Training for netting is a lot like playing Tetris because you are bending things down and moving them all into place. It is cool to be able to plan how I want my canopy to look in the future. I have never spent this amount of time setting things up for the future, so it is cool to see how well it is all working.

In the past, I used to use clips to bend the branches down, but I have found that I get a healthier plant and thicker branches by doing it all by hand and manipulating the entire branch and not just the small area where the clip attaches.

This plant only has eight of its main branches on it, but there are so many branches that have grown off of those main ones. I have no idea how many branches there are on the plant right now and it will continue to sprout new ones until I induce flower. Once I start the flowering process, all of the little branches will begin shooting upwards towards the lights for about two weeks. Then after the plant has stretched upwards, it will begin to form some really nice buds.

This is what a top view of the plant looks like after spending some time bending branches down and moving them around to the different squares on the net. By the end of the day, the plant will have moved the branches and leaves around a bit and recovered from the stress of this training. There should be a lot of new growth that happens over this next week as I prepare for flower, so stay tuned to see how big this lady is going to get.