Taking care of stretched seedlings the advanced way

green_nobody

Okay, this is a way to common problem in peoples grows not to address it at least once here - how you should properly take care of stretched seedlings.

First, why does this happen to you in the first place:
As far as i have seen it myself it is in 9 from 10 time all about lack of light. Most commonly the seedlings are just too far away from the light source - keep your babies just a inch away! The next possible problem i come across is not sufficient lighting of the seedlings - so someone is trying to raise 20 plants with one tiny 10W CFL...
And the last would be a totally insufficient (and if you would ask me straight stupid choice) light source as a green incandescence bulbs or heating bulbs - people that still try those should do some reading first before even trying anything in the direction of growing MJ.


So, before going nuts, fix your starting problem/problems first or you not going anywhere, even after doing what I will show here in a moment.


How to fix the stretch

Now, after you took care of the cause of the problem it is time to fix the rest. Now the usual method would be to place to plant into a pot or bucket that is big enough to bury the entire overstretched part of the plant – but this brings a new problem. Your babies will then not fully use the soil surrounding it, so not root thru it but rather build only roots around the walls and bottom of the bucket. Now this can cause things from simply wasted volume to the roots can not supported the weight from the soil if you lift your plant at the stem – causing it to rip off and die.

Now to prevent this you have to reduce the volume of soil you will have to use here.
My favorite method is to bend the plant over and place the jiffy pellet sideways and then set it into the new pot and hold the stem up and bury the plant so only the head shows.

Key at this point is to be very gentle and use no force on the stem nor just dump the soil in, rather tickle the soil slowly around the plants stem and jiffy pellet.


Now pull the upper stem gently in a large bend to the center and fill up the pot with soil mix. By the end it should look like this here…





plant been provided to me by Basement_Jack, pal of mine and noob grower.

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Pappy

Good info, GN

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You can't believe anything I say, and only half of what you see me do.

crewdude

I totally had my lights like a foot above my plants and they looked to me like they were getting tall too fast, good thing I read this, just raised them up so the lights are right above them... Hopefully they'll stop and because they're all getting light from an angle will start growing nodes.... oooooh.... would that be a good idea to stretch it and then put on strong lights all around it and have it grow outward from the center?

green_nobody

Huh?! lights from an angle to grow nodes?

On a stretching plant, the space between the nodes are stretching and less nodes, branches and leaves will grow that way and eventually the plant will fall over and die. So to force a plant into stretching on purpose is just a dumb thing to do!!
If you want that your plants grow more notches faster you have to proper position your lights first and use proper lights too!

Just read my first post once more and then we continue with your issue here, okay

peace

__________________
Keep the gun oiled and the thumb green!

http://www.pch.gc.ca/progs/cpsc-ccsp...Canada-eng.MP3