Heh, that's great news!
400 gm? What size tent? If you're in a 2' x 2', that's a very good crop. If you're in a 2' x 4', that's about what seed sellers forecast/predict/lie about in their yield pages because that's really close to 400 gm/sq meter. Don't see yourself short - many auto growers are very happy to get ½ of that.
"a little bigger before changing nutes over to bloom" - personal choice - I run the same nutes, drop to chop. Bloom nutes push a lot of K because plants absorb it going into flower. Where does it go? Into the seeds so that it can be retrieved from the cotyledons. Oh, hold it, our plants don't create seeds. Hmmm…
Bugbee has stated that reason for K uptake. I'll take his word for it, though. After half a dozen grows using the same nutes, I tried a bloom fert (I use jacks 3-2-1). The only change that I'm aware of is that the ammoniacal nitrogen dropped pH so fast I was adding Up at least three times a day. It got so bad, I unboxed a Bluelab doser and let it take care pump its little peristaltic heart out. No mas. One formula, drop to chop for me.
Oh, yeh, "get a little bigger" - nothing to do with the different ferts. Vegetative stages is where the plant builds the infrastructure. A cannabis plant will keep vegging as long as it has > 12 hours ± of light.
Oh, I found a typo in what you posted - "I'm seriously considering trying photos on my next grow as I
want to try some more aggressive training am going to increase my light levels to increase my yields."
My belief/understanding/something that's based on a limited knowledge of plant bio - training a plant will tend to increase yield only/primarily/mainly because it spreads out the canopy, allowing the plants to absorb more light. Other than that, I don't think training a plant increases crop yield and crop quality. The underlying rationale is that light is the only means by which cannabis generates food (fertilizer ≠ food, right?). And, per the attached document, research has shown an almost liner relationship between increasing DLI and crop yield and crop quality.
LST and HST are methods of shaping plants but what about yield?
Two documents of interest. The first describes the results of different pruning methods. It's a bit of a grind but it does support the idea of pruning being the best approach to increasing yield. Topping is not discussed.
In the Frontiers paper, there's a lot of good info about light levels but it was only yesterday that I realized that "the dog hadn't barked" (from the Sherlock Holmes story).
In the paper, "CB" is the abbreviation for the "culture basin" - where they grow the plants.
The highlight on page 5 reads "The apical meristems were removed (i.e., “topped”) from the first batch of clones, 10 d after transplant, and the second batch were not topped. "
That tells us that the plants in CB1 were topped but they left the apical stem on the plants that were in CB2.
The issue? Scroll to the Results section and the first sentence reads "No CB effects were found in any leaf photosynthesis, leaf morphology, and post-harvest parameters; therefore, CB1 and CB2 data were pooled for the development of all models except secondary metabolites, which were only measured in CB1."
"No CB effects were found in…" - meaning, as best I can deduce, "there was no difference in". I think that's a valid plain language description. If so, that indicates that topping had no impact on leaf photosynthesis or morphology nor on "post-harvest parameters".
I don't have a definition for "post-harvest parameters" but I can guaran-god-damn-tee that if there had been a significant difference between topped and non-topped it would have been noted and, further, had it been noted, it would have been "a topic that requires further study".
That's not smoking gun evidence but, given that they believed it was valid to glom the results together, I think that's strong support of the argument that topping, in and of itself, doesn't increase yield.
That was a little nugget that I found yesterday (amazing what we get up to when we're sidelined with a case of the lung crud!). The big push is more light ==> more weed.
If anyone is familiar with Chandra and its demonstration the photosynthesis curve starts to roll off at 500µmols, this paper deals with that directly and in a not so subtle manner. No question about it, whoever wrote this paper…did not beat around the bush.
