How do SCroG's Work??

[FreezerBoy]

scrog is a lot harder to explain than to actually do,

Sing, HALLELUJAH my brother! Sing me the truth!

A former backyard grower, when I first got here, I knew nothing about ScrOG or DWC. As in nothing with a capital NOTH! Using only the info here and lessons from members, lookie what I got stuck with. Several colas were longer than my forearm with hand and fingers extended (and I have freakishly long arms.) Damn near 1/2 pound, just shy of the 1gram/watt mark and I knew NOTHING.



Yes, there were many moments of panic but, they were borne of ignorance and all turned out to be a waste of time.

 

[J.C.grower]

Lot of different ways to scrog.... even vert scrog.
Experience is the best teacher. Keep reading, and get growing

thanks mario, ive actually never seen this method used before and i am very intrigued by it.

thanks for all the great help.

 

[J.C.grower]

thanks for the help...LST?

thanks for the help...LST?

high guys its j.c. again, just wanted to tell you all that i greatly appreciate all this help and explanations of the scrog and topping method. However i have decided to start with LST method , since i am a newbie and want to start off with something easier IMO.
these are a few of the ladies i LST'd.

 

[VerdantGreen]

LST is cool but i would say it requires more skill to do well than scrog does. both achieve the same end - a canopy full of buds.

good luck

VG

 

[FreezerBoy]

Never discount grower personality.

LST and ScrOG are essentially the same thing. You can't make a "wrong" choice. If one appeals to you more than the other, you're more likely to do it well.

 

[GrowBox420]

Nice work Marlo!

 

[Hydro-Soil]

Strain has a lot to do with how you treat your scrog as well.

Topping is very useful for strains that always have a dominant cola... no matter what you do to the plant. These strains aren't optimal for scrog, but given veg time they're definitely productive.

The best strains for scrogging are ones that tend to produce the same size buds, no matter where they are on the stalk, at every point on the screen. The more even the canopy... the more optimal your light footprint can be.

The optimal scrog screen is when the buds growing above the screen are just far enough away from each other to allow good ventilation. Damp areas and no-airflow areas are your enemy and promote mold and other issues quickly.

It should take anyone a few runs with a new strain to get to know what it likes. Practice makes perfect (and is very meditative as well. LOL)

Stay Safe!

 

[Maddhatter]

be aware that the twist ties you are using will "cut" into the stalk as the plant grows larger, so be prepaired to replace with green tape or having to move the ties every other day or so when they get larger

 

[Marlo]

be aware that the twist ties you are using will "cut" into the stalk as the plant grows larger, so be prepaired to replace with green tape or having to move the ties every other day or so when they get larger

Absolutely NOT TRUE, unless you are choking the plant for some crazy reason. Twist ties, zip ties, and fuzzy pipe cleaners are harmless when used properly.

 

[VerdantGreen]

agreed, you just make sure there is plenty of room for the stems to widen when you put the tie on - and it's good to check them now and again too.

 

[LadyLargely]

hey guys so i'm new to the whole "growing" culture, and i am on my second grow and want to make it better than the first one as i want to improve my mistakes. I've been reading and seeing on some of the other pages; people using SCroG as a way of training the pant. my question is do i have have to top the plant while using the SCroG, or does the SCroG just do the "trick" and makes the branches start growing laterally?

Ohhh shit J.C.! now look what you gone and did! You went asking for some facts, but in truth what you where asking was a very loaded question. What you did was a bit like asking a group of stoners "why is pot illegal". You will get a myriad of answers, generally all of them with some merit.

How to go about screen-training techniques is vastly a matter of opinion. However there have been several things presented in this thread already and they are not all ScrOG.

This here I would call screen training. It is a plant which has been flattened out by putting a screen in the middle of it:

I personally would not call this ScrOG.

The difference of opinions might actually have to do with training technique. SCW introduced SCROG to OG and was considered the real master of the technique...but I'm with SCW and think the real trick is in getting the branches to the screen and then snaking them around. So a single stalk works fine in that case.

I also consider SCW the true originator of ScrOG. I was just a noobish lurker on Overgrow when he was really swinging, but I still remember him. His technique involved actually weaving the stems of a cannabis plant into a screen. This is not what you see in the above image.

This 'true ScrOG' is more high-maintenance than screen training, but it offers more control without having to top the plant and slow it down. In order to truly weave a plant you must supercrop it which is a phrase that SCW also coined because it went hand-in-hand with his ScrOG technique.

Supercropping involves gripping the main stem of a plant and crushing it gently while rotating slightly. Just so that it gives a little. You want to break the outer phloem without damaging the inner xylem. This makes that section of stem very compliant so that it may be woven into a screen without kinking up and breaking off.

So, to answer the question of the thread title:

"How do SCroG's Work??"

It goes a little something like this:

Start some bushy cannabis plants and grow them up into a screen:



Then you allow some of the upward shoots to push through the screen, just a bit. When the growth over the screen has gotten a couple of inches tall then you supercrop the shoots right where they are perpendicular to the screen and bend them over, poking it over one step in the screen and then under a second one using a total of three holes in the screen. Because you need three adjacent holes to complete a single step, hexagonal screen works much better than square:



Do this repeatedly until the plant is back at the screen level. Make sure to poke all fan leaves below the screen as well:



Then do it to all of the plants:



Then do it over and over again until you've filled the screen. You'll want to make sure that you hit the switch and go to 12/12 before the screen hits %50 full:

By doing this you don't need to top the plants and yet can maintain perfect control over them. They'll grow in whatever shape you want them to. This means rapid growth. That animated .GIF above took place during stretch and lasted only 10 days during that time the plants easily more than doubled in size. Training without topping makes this possible.

This technique is true ScrOG. The results of it are unique only to ScrOG grows: horizontal colas:



This arrangement ensures that every bit of bud gets maximum light exposure. It also allows for ABSURDLY compact grow setups. True ScrOG can keep plants low. Very, very low without topping:



I finished that grow and others like it with the lamp suspended no more than seven inches above the soil level. No topping, ever. The area below the screen fills up with fan leaves and the space below it is a natural dead-zone:



This means that there's no point in growing the plant up really tall before introducing it to the screen. Everything below the screen is just going to die anyway. The screen should be introduced as early as possible and as low down as possible. This makes early topping superfluous as the plant has already begun screen training by the time topping would be appropriate.

Horizontal colas from true ScrOG are where its at for yielding the densest, most compact bud under the most excruciating space and/or lighting constraints.

 

[rives]

Interesting technique. While I see how it maintains a much lower profile, it seems to me that the yield would be substantially lower than on the style that you are calling "screen training". The buds growing vertically through the screen pockets are going to be able to attain much more overall length, resulting in a higher cumulative yield, than if they were laid down and forced to conform to the screen. Do you see any benefit to this variation other than severely limited headroom?

 

[VerdantGreen]

nice description LL, im not sure about who invented scrog, i was using the same 'modular scrog' technique that i do now at least 20 years ago and well before the internet came about. i invented it for myself out of necessity and of course i didnt hear the term 'scrog' for many years after.
personally i prefer to let the buds grow above the screen to the depth that my light can usefully penetrate - in the case of a 250, my current light, that is about 6 inches or so. imo a scrog is a 3d entity and not a flat screen - that is how you get the high yields of over 1gpw.
i also dont weave the branches into the screen because sometimes i like to reposition whole branches as the canopy takes shape - so i nearly always just keep them under the screen until im ready to let them grow upwards.

VG

 

[LadyLargely]

Interesting technique. While I see how it maintains a much lower profile, it seems to me that the yield would be substantially lower than on the style that you are calling "screen training"...

Potential for ScrOG to reduce yield depends entirely on how much yield you where going to get in the first place. The bulk of it's benefits are limited pretty chiefly to situations where the penetrating power of your light source is very low. If you are running mid to large-size HID lamps then you can get good bud that grows underneath other bud. With floros this is not really the case. Also, what I show is just a simple flat screen with only a minor concave. The technique can be much better when the screen can be made less flat, forming a deeper concave that could conform to slightly more powerful lamps like big 60+ watt CFLs or 70-150 watt HPS/MH/CMH lamps.

The buds growing vertically through the screen pockets are going to be able to attain much more overall length, resulting in a higher cumulative yield, than if they were laid down and forced to conform to the screen...

I'm not sure I follow you here. High overall length of individual colas is the whole reason why ScrOG works well. With low-penetration lamps vertical colas can only produce dense bud for 3-5 vertical inches or so. Whereas if you turn that same cola sideways then it can stretch out for 6, 8, 10 or even more linear inches, producing top-quality bud along that whole section.

I think my photographs may be confusing you on the formation of the plant. Because of the small size of the plants shown it can be hard to see how they are organized.

See, close-up shots like this one:



Show bud curling upward around the screen and clearing it by only an inch or two. This makes it seem like the plant is only producing inch-long buds. However this is not the case, what you are seeing is the odd-looking formation that is a horizontal cola. Look at this marked-up wider shot of the same plant:

The main stem path has been highlighted in red with the black dot being where it meets the soil. All of the purple lines trace the rough paths of the ancillary colas through the screen. The oldest ones are towards the bottom with younger, shorter ones following the main stem towards the top.

In a normal screen training regiment, most of the purple lines would be located here:

...In the circled 'dead zone'. Ancillary colas located in this type of area are not productive and do not contribute to yield.

If I trained that way most of my purple lines would be unproductive like in the photo above. They would simply be 'topped' with a 4-5 inch long bud. Whereas in the case of my screen-training regiment some of the colas are 9-12 inches long, producing thick bud along that entire length! This is much more bud than those same colas would have produced if they where allowed to stand up vertically.

In my low ScrOG arrangement, there is basically zero plant mass located in the below-screen area. That's why I showed this image:



It was to show that very little of the plant is located in the dead zone. All of the branches are able to reach up into the screen almost immediately.

You just have to keep scale in mind. This picture:



Shows a plant that is 56 days old from dry seed. That's 31 days to sprout, veg, and flower to the point you see above. It did not start as a clone or large seedling. Relative to the size of the plant and the time scale, what you see is quite a bit of cannabis. Seeing as that the breed was White Widow and it was only 25 days into flower you can imagine how much fatter all the bud-sites where by the end.

This arrangement allows a small plant to be very productive, much more so if you had all of those lower stem sections with no bud on them. Larger plants can still yield well with naked branches, they just have more mass overall. However, for some growers, space constraints mean those naked branches are just a waste of precious cubic inches.

Given more veg time and a wider light source this sort of screen would produce a lot of bud at a very consistent quality. If you have space/power constraints and can only flower with floros or very small HIDs true ScrOG can be the way to go.

nice description LL, im not sure about who invented scrog, i was using the same 'modular scrog' technique that i do now at least 20 years ago...

Hell man, I have no idea who "invented" it either. ScrOG is tied up in screen-training which has been around for decades. All I know is that Overgrow user SCW was the first to show this specific supercropping and weaving technique in any kind of published capacity. He did not 'invent' screen-training and indeed he did a lot to differentiate himself from more traditional techniques like yourself and rives have been talking about.

...imo a scrog is a 3d entity and not a flat screen - that is how you get the high yields of over 1gpw.
i also dont weave the branches into the screen because sometimes i like to reposition whole branches as the canopy takes shape - so i nearly always just keep them under the screen until im ready to let them grow upwards...

Well shit man, with a big-ole 250 watt HPS of course you'll want screen-training to be more of a "3d entity". That type of lamp is actually capable of some penetration. Going single-layer ScrOG with that strong of a lamp would be a waste because the light would penetrate the one layer of bud and keep going.

Full-weave ScrOG is only really useful when the light source has strong limitations on penetration.

 

[VerdantGreen]

good points LL - we all need to adapt our techniques to our own growing situation. i used to do flatter scrogs under t8's (before t5's were around showing my age here )

obviously you can fit more buds into a canopy if you 'arrange' them upright rather than horizontally, but there wouldnt be much benefit unless the light can penetrate enough to let them develop fully

VG

 

[GrowBox420]

 

[trichogg]

Speaking of floros LadyLarge,

Here's my last Scrog under the screen with no weaving 2 plants in a mini fridge.. I had fun with that cycle & pulled out some dense colas

Keep ya thumbs in tha greenz.

Trich.

 

[J. Greenstein]

This thread has been a helpful read. What are some strains which are ideal for scrog? Would an OG or Bubba kush work well? Indica or sativa dominant strains? Or something about 50 - 50 indica and sativa?

 

[J. Greenstein]

Also, I'm wonderin how easy it is to manipulate a rectangular shape? Like say 2 plants to fill a 4' x 4' area so to make each plant 2' x 4'.

 

[opiumo]

hey guys so i'm new to the whole "growing" culture, and i am on my second grow and want to make it better than the first one as i want to improve my mistakes. I've been reading and seeing on some of the other pages; people using SCroG as a way of training the pant. my question is do i have have to top the plant while using the SCroG, or does the SCroG just do the "trick" and makes the branches start growing laterally?

To answer your question, no you dont have to top the plant while using SCroG as training.