If you’re an at-home marijuana grower looking for a way to improve your yield amount – look no further! Super cropping bud has never been easier all thanks to this guide below where you’ll learn how to super crop, what you’ll need, when to do it, and other similar techniques that’ll help you get the best out of your crop.
Super Cropping Table of Contents:
- Why Super Crop Cannabis?
- What You Need To Super Crop
- When To Super Crop
- How To Super Crop Your Cannabis Plants
- How To Fix Broken Branches
- Super Cropping, Main-Lining, And LST
- The Final Results: Bigger, Higher-Quality Yields
What is Super Cropping?
Super cropping is an intermediate to advanced cannabis training technique that delivers incredible results. This technique if for cannabis growers that are looking to cause a small amount of stress to their plants in order for them to produce more buds overall. Best Bud Seeds doesn’t recommend this technique for beginning growers, however, since it can increase the risk of disease in your garden.
Why Super Crop Cannabis?
Super cropping is a high-stress training technique that involves pinching and bending branches to damage the inner fibers while leaving the outer lining intact.
While it might seem conflicting, this is the right kind of stress for cannabis plants is actually very beneficial for your plants, encouraging more vigorous vegetative growth and better bud development. Why does this work so well? This is your plants natural response to predators and other forms of stress; female plants produce cannabinoid and terpene-rich trichomes. Thus, the damage you inflict when super cropping is believed to trigger the plant’s defense mechanisms, causing it to take up more nutrients, making it grow at twice it’s own rate.
Secondarily, growers also use super cropping as a way to manipulate how your plants grow. After they’ve just been cropped, your plant’s branches will seem weak and flimsy; you can take advantage of this and tie them down (like how you would when using LST, we’ll get to that part later on) to teach the plant to grow in a particular direction.
As they recover, your plants will form thicker hard knots at the crop points. During flowering, these hardened knots will help support the weight of your plant’s buds and plant itself.
What You Need To Super Crop
- Twine, yarn, or zip ties (this is to tie down branches and hold them in place)
- Garden stakes
- Duct tape
When To Super Crop
For beginning growers, we recommend super cropping your plants just once during the late vegetative stage, ideally 3–7 days plan on switching them to their flowering stage. This will give them enough time to recover from the stress of super cropping before they start focusing their energy on developing those dense buds.
REMINDER: Remember to only super crop healthy plants. Dealing with pest infestations, nutrient deficiencies, or any other type of negative stress is something to be dealt with another time. Since super cropping is a very stressful technique, and your plants need to be extremely healthy to be able to cope with it.
If you have any previous experience with this technique, Best Bud Seeds recommends super cropping a second time within the first two weeks of flowering. Typically, in this time plants exhibit a burst of explosive growth at the beginning of bloom (known as “stretching”). After that, let your plants recover and stick to your normal feeding/watering schedule. After performing this second super crop, you should notice an increase in bud sites.
How To Super Crop Your Cannabis Plants
Super cropping can be intimidating for new growers, and for good reason; it takes experience and skill to perform this technique, and a simple mistake could seriously stunt a plant’s growth and ruin all of your hard work. That’s why Best Bud Seeds is happy to assist in the learning of this difficult technique. Below are all the steps we use to super crop at our growing facilities.
- Start off by determining which branches to crop. We recommend cropping branches that are mature, but not old or woody. Any branches that are notably taller than others are a good place to start, as super cropping will lower them to create a more even canopy.
- Start by cropping the bottom of a branch. You want to squeeze it gently between your thumb, fore, and index fingers while simultaneously bending it slightly in the direction you want it to grow. The goal is to crush the core of the branch so you can manipulate it to your needs. But also keep a gentle touch, as it can help to roll the branch between your fingers for several seconds to make it more pliable, then gently bend it in the desired direction.
- Work your way up the branch using that rolling motion, leaving a few centimeters between each crop. We don’t recommend cropping anything above 2–3 nodes from the tip.
- Once your branch has been cropped and is leaning in the direction you want it to, it’s time to tie it down at each crop site using twine or zip ties.
The trick to super cropping is finding that sweet spot where the inside of the branch feels soft and malleable while the outside remains completely intact and almost hardened. After super cropping, your branches should lean more to one side, and the tips should be bent at roughly 90°. As a beginner, this may take some time to get the hang of.
How To Fix Broken Branches
Inexperienced and advanced growers can commonly deal with broken branches, and no it won’t kill your cannabis plant. We’re experts at trouble shooting the little stuff in plants, so here’s how Best Bud Seeds fixes broken branches:
Tape around the tear or snap with duct tape to create a bandage for your plant. If needed, support your branch by tying it to another nearby branch or to a garden stake. In a about a week is when you can remove the “bandage”. As your plant heals, it will grow big knots in all the spots you bent/snapped (including ones you broke purposely). This is completely normal (and beneficial!).
Super Cropping, Main-Lining, And LST
If you’re trying to achieve maximum levels of yield, use super cropping together with other techniques like main-lining and LST. Main-lining involves creating a “manifold”, which essentially means topping plants to give rise to two main stems from a single node. LST (or Low-Stress-Training) involves bending the resulting stems to grow parallel to the ground, increasing light penetration and controlling vegetative growth in the process. By combining all of these techniques, experienced growers can see incredible grow results with not all that much effort.
The Final Results: Bigger, Higher-Quality Yields
Super cropping is our favorite high-stress technique that has a huge impact of the size and quality of your yield, and we recommend that is goes hand in hand with our Indica or animal cookie seeds strains. Are you going to try our super cropping method? Send us photos on Instagram or Facebook and let us know how you liked it!
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