Your seedlings are growing nicely and now you are waiting for the vegetation stage. Vegetation is the time when you start training your plants, bending them to your will to fit in the space that you have available.

The easiest way to identify the veg stage is to look at your nodes. Your plant will start with symmetrical nodes/branches. As soon as she reaches maturity she will start showing asymmetrical nodes.

Training your plant can take a lot of different forms. The most common is LST or Low Stress Training.

Low stress training involve bending, guiding or forming your plant into a form that you want. This can be done for aesthetic reasons, to keep your plant short when growing in a tent or to open up bud sites..

In the photo above you can see the plant is pulled in a horizontal position. This will ensure that it stays low enough to fit in a grow box that has limited height. It also opens up the lower bud sites, while fooling the plant into thinking it has fallen over. This in turn causes the plant to send more of its growth hormones to the lower bud-sites and they will now grow larger and closer in size to your main cola.

In the above photo you can see that the main stem was pulled down and then the smaller stems were spread out to assist in building a SCReen of Green (SCRoG). Scrog works exelent in circumstances where you want to cover a larger area with one plant.

Moving on from LST we get HST High Stress Training. HST involves you damagin the plant in some way. The most common two techniques are Topping and Fimming. To top your plant you will wait for it to have at least 4 to 6 nodes. At this stage the plant will be strong enough to survive what you are about to do.

You will cut the main stem beneath the fourth node. This is going to force your plant to develop 2 main colas, pushing up your yield significantly.

FIMing is almost the same as Topping. FIMing however involves you removing only the upper tip of your plant. FIM stands for ” Fuck I Missed” which often happens as FIMing isn’t as precise as topping

To fim your plant you need to cut or pinch off about a inch from the top of your plant

If you FIM properly your plant will now grow FOUR new main colas. I have tried my had at FIMing twice now, each time without success.

A more advanced version of HST, or maybe rather a combination of LST & HST in Mainling, or Manifolding.

To mainline your plant you will start by topping your plant. You will then make use of LST to flatten your plant, spreading your branches to the sides

As a noob I recommend that you start simple. Either use LST to bend your plant to your will, or simply top your plant to give you 2 main colas.