Hey DGC! I love the show so much. Thank you so much for what you guys do. And a special thank you from my garden to Scotty for creating recharge. You are the man!
I’ve gotten a late start this year on my outdoor grow. Due to budget problems, the amount of work I had to do to prepare the garden, and a tropical Michigan spring this year, I couldn’t start planting until June. So I’m considering different training techniques to apply to my garden to help increase yield. I’m leaning towards trying a SCROG outdoors but I have some questions about it and I was hoping to gain some insight on the differences between scroging outdoors and indoors.
Details of my garden are as follows. My raised beds are around 4’x4′ and 18 inches tall. I’ve topped almost all of them, some twice. The beds are filled with a sifted rich native sandy loam, amended with local compost, ewc, bat guano, bone meal, blood meal and azamite, and I water in recharge and RAW nutrients from NPK industries. I have 48 plants between just 6 inches (just popped 3 weeks ago) and almost 4 feet (popped 6 weeks ago). I planted seedlings as I built and filled raised beds throughout June. I plan on surrounding each plant with trellis fencing.
Questions:
1. What plant training techniques would you guys recommend for increasing my yield other then the topping I’m doing?
2. Is SCROG a good idea? If so, how should I do it?
2-a. How big of a trellis should be above each plant? I’m thinking 5’x5′
2-b. How big should each individual square be inside the trellis? I’m thinking 3″x3″
2-c. How far above each plant should I place each trellis? I’m thinking around 2′. The plants that are much taller would get a higher trellis.
Growing outdoor in Michigan can be challenging sometimes. We’ve had torrential rains, crazy humidity, at the end of June there was a windstorm with winds gusts of around 75 mph all day. Thanks to this show my plants have looked at these challenges and walked strait thru them without skipping a beat.
Next year I will be lining pallets with rows of 100 gallon radical bags filled with soil from build-a-soil, and starting them indoors for a couple months before I bring them out. I couldn’t afford it this year, but I will be able to next year no problem.
Any and all tips are very welcome.
Thanks again crew. Much love
-Matthew’s Garden.
1. Pop and twist, supercrop, bend those branches
Ive seen lots of outdoor wrapped in cages. That way you can position the colas and produce airflow deep inside the plant. Scrog is usually for indoor where light source has intensity limitations while the sun does not. Small tomato cage over seedling then wrap your 4×4 in caging, also will provide support for the colas.
Mendo Dope style
https://www.weedworldmagazine.org/2018/10/10/plant-training-101-words-and-photos-by-mendo-dope/
I know someone who attempts a scrog outside nearly every year and it always ends up just being support, for the lower portion of the plant. He always grows monsters, so the scrog net is always too low, or in the center.