Training Your Crop: Our Top Manipulation Tip to Improve Your Yield

This brings us to the point of today’s newsletter. Apical dominance is excellent for plants in an unaltered environment. In your grow room, however, with limited vertical space, and loads of artificial lighting, growing upwards not only wastes the lighting you have worked so hard to curate but is also an inefficient use of horizontal space. Our solution to this common problem is simple, and it’s called low stress training (LST).

LST is a technique used to force plants into growing horizontally rather than vertically, which means your entire grow room is being utilised, and every fruit, vegetable or flower in your yield is receiving consistent lighting. Low stress training works by disrupting plants hormone levels, triggering the plant to prioritise general growth, rather than growth to central nodes. Low stress training will eventually result in larger yields, and more evenly sized fruit, but this process does take time. You may notice slowed growth immediately after a branch is bent, but as foliage redirects itself towards the light, growing will drastically improve.

When conducting LST, it is crucial to adopt a method that is strong enough to support the plant over its flowering phase. It is also important that the method you choose allows access to plants so that you can manage, clean and maintain growing foliage.

There are a number of ways to perform low stress training on your crop. The first way begins with gardening wire that will subsequently hold branches horizontally in place. Simply bend the main stem of your plant downwards towards the rim of your pot, and secure gently with gardening wire.

The second way to low stress train your plants is to use flora mesh netting. Stretch your netting approximately half a metre from the base of your plant so that lower branches are able to grow up to the screen and access direct light.

Low stress training should be started as soon as possible because young growth is much easier to manipulate than older growth. In saying this, it is important not to rush when trying to train stems to grow horizontally. You should aim to carry out the above processes in stages to decrease the level of stress felt by your plants.

Once your plant has grown an additional 7 to 8 centimetres, repeat the process of low stress training.