Yessir, two plants. That's the first thing people say when they see my cab in late flower. "I wouldn't have believed they were only two plants without just the two main tree trunks to prove it." I take that as a grand compliment from growers and just plain ol' pot-heads alike. But from a grower it's all the sweeter of course.
To tell all truth, when I read other journals and there are people intensely discussing fimming, topping, super-cropping, I'm not even sure what they're talking about. You saw what I did, bro. On the very first page of my journal, you'll see the ties I made in early clone re-veg. I didn't change or add much. I just let them develop in that posture and they stayed low as hell. When they really got their wheels spinning in the initial stretch phase of flower, I added one more tie to each of the main tops to pry the plants open more, allowing the inner branches to spread. Aside from some minor ties I added last night to pull some sagging lower branches up, It's not a complicated train at all.
I'm spoiled, really, by the power I've engineered into my system. First, nothing dies in there unless I cull it. And second, plants grow so rapidly and vigorously in there, I've come to think of it as "angry growth." It's really all I can do to keep plants from exploding into outer-space in that cab. Tying is just a desperate attempt to keep them away from the blazing hot light, it just happens to result in multiple kolas too (lucky me).
And lastly, I'm gonna give it up to the pheno. These clones came from a highly engineered mother. I have the name and number of the club manager who I got them from. I'm not gonna lose that info. Hot damn.
Edit:
Just to give you and anyone reading this an idea, once the roots start poking out of the net pot and the first few strands dip into the surface of that bubbling cauldron, you can forget about it. I would duct-tape the fuckin' things down onto the surface of the tub if I could. There's no such thing as too low when it comes to a monster root system. When a root system gets monster, you could haphazardly chop branches and it will replace itself with two, three or four...I guess that's what they mean by some of those cutting techniques I've read discussed here and elsewhere. But that's because a setup like this is so crazy. I have mutant vigor, so I don't really have time or reason to cut or chop tops because usually there are so many, I don't see a need for forced multiplication. -- and again, they grow so fast, I don't even have time to think about it.
I had to do that severe 'pinching' technique last time in a last ditch attempt to keep the buds from burning due to the out of control sativa growth. More than pinching, these branches were pretty thick and woody like bamboo already, so I had to snap, snap, snap, snap, and snap. It was painful as you can imagine. When the branches are woody already, it's not bending, it's breaking. There was clear sap oozing from the breaks everywhere. When I was finished, it looked like Yogi Bear took a squat in the middle of my grow. But the roots were unimaginably huge at that point and drinking at an incredible rate. The plants just laughed off the damage, healed themselves at the breaks and turned semi-upright again. And the broken branches seemed to get angry because the top buds chunked up even thicker on the broken ones that had to heal themselves. Frightening.
Once I had this strange dream that the plants were so out of control that they were growing out of the box like alien vines all over the walls of my apartment. Hey, don't tell me you don't dream about your grows... when you can remember them, of course.
BUT you are also right about the heat exchange problem that fluoros DON'T have. If you could slide a couple more tubes at the lower part of your plants on the sides, fairly close to the plant's main stalk, I think it would help nicely.
