Here goes nothing...

A few days ago, I mainlined the first of my quad grape plants. After a couple days, the plant seems to be doing perfectly and isn't stressed or anything. Now we will see if doing that will stunt the growth, but I don't think that it will since I did it so early in the plant's life cycle.

So what is mainlining? It is a high stress technique that involves trimming the main stem. There are many different benefits to mainlining, like increased yields, a bigger and more balanced canopy and a better control on the plant stretching.

My last northern lights plant stretched so much and if I hadn't bent it twice, I am sure it would have been over 6 feet tall. That plant looked so stupid and there really was no balance on how the plant was getting its light because there were so many different levels to it.

This one above is the plant that I just cut this morning. With the next set of plants that I am going to cut, I will wait until there are more branches and it is a bit taller. I am going to see when the better time to cut it would be, but the longer I wait, the more of a chance it will stress the plant too much since these are all autos.

I have seen several videos on people mainlining and they have even trimmed off the lower sets of branches as well, but I think if I did that to these, it would be too much all at once.

Since the first plant I cut is doing good, I decided to start some branch training today to help spread the remaining branches out so they don't grow straight up. I am hoping that starting all of this training early enough will be a lot better than waiting until the plants are older. Autos are on a set timeline with how long they will be in the veg state, so I want to make sure that I don't waste too much of the plant's time growing branches and stuff that will just be cut off later. I would rather all the nutrients go to places of the plant that use them the most.

Well, that is it for this update. Today was feeding day, so the littler ones got their first full feeding and it was the second for the three larger plants that sprouted a few days earlier. Hopefully by next Monday when they get their next feeding, they are all quite larger than they are now.