As you get ready to move into the flowering stage, we’d like to bring your attention to a few important preparations. You should complete these four steps before your plant begins to flower:

The main idea of topping is to break its apical dominance, or tendency to grow one main cola, and immediately splits the plant into two main stems by removing the top of the plant’s main stem. It's better to keep it at 10 to 12 inch in height to avoid the branch growing to hit the lights, which will cause albino buds.

Low Stress Training (LST) is the process of bending stems and securing them in place. The general idea is to bend tall stems down and away from the middle of the plant as it grows so the plant takes on a more flat and wide shape to create several top colas to take the best advantage of indoor grow lights so less light is lost and yields are higher overall.

As the picture shows, unfold the stem by bending down and away from the center of the plant.

When the plant is left to grow as it chooses, it usually has more branches than it has the energy to support. This means that a lot of energy is wasted on smaller branches, especially the lower ones.

In order to get a greater amount of high quality bud, we need to remove some of the less important and weaker branches. We suggest keeping only six main branches in week 3 before switching to the flowering stage, as the picture shows..

Defoliation means removing leaves on your plant, usually only the biggest fan leaves. This might be done in the vegetative stage for various reasons, but the main “technique” is using defoliation in a certain way during the first month of the flowering stage in order to encourage buds to grow bigger.

Congratulations! After all the steps you have done, you can switch to the flowering stage.

Here is a checklist for you to determine whether it's time to switch or not.