An uncontrolled stretch can lead to :

• Physically unstable and weak plants
• Poor yields and low buds quality
• Too long inter-nodes
• A plant that may touch the lights
• Less control on your culture

Stretch isn't a bad thing, but you must keep control on it to not end up being overwhelmed. There are many factors that play a role on your plant height as genetic or environment.

The aim of this guide is to help you to understand this mechanism and be able to control stretch the way you want. If your plant height match with your box dimensions you can expect good yields.
Keep in mind that handling your plant will always bring you benefits.

Now let's see which factors affect cannabis stretch.

As you should probably know, cannabis has different types of strains. Those strains does have different physical aspects including final height, stretch time or strength. The strain must be adapted to your growing space.

The first point to consider is that indica dominant strains are more likely to stay smaller and more compact, again this is a match with micro grow standards. We suggest looking for strains conceived for small grow-spaces as the dwarfs, shorts or fast strains.

However, genetics aren't always stable and predictable. We recommend getting seeds from reputable or trust-able breeders. This will avoid any unexpected surprises due to genetic issues.

If you want to grow multiple plants in the same grow-space you should choose strains with similar characteristics to create a more homogeneous culture and maximize light distribution.

If you grow auto-flowering strains then you can skip this part.
One of the advantages of growing photo-periodic strains is that you can choose when to flip to bloom and launch the flowering stretch.

With this in mind you can control or a least try to predict the final height by switching to bloom at the right time.

We recommend switching your light schedules when your plant reaches about the half of the height of your grow-space.

When the difference between day and night temperatures is too high (not as high as us 😉) your plant will fully stretch. To tame this stretch you must** keep a maximum difference of 5°C between day and night**.

If you still have stretch issues with this temps ratio, you can reduce this differences between day and night or even raise night temps to highly decrease natural stretch.

We still recommend keeping a difference between day and night as removing it will probably stress your plant.

Not only for the stretch, ventilation is really important when growing indoors.

Having a fan in your grow-space will strengthen branches leading to a more compact general grow.

Stretch usually means that your plant is missing light, so they will grow and search for more.

Increasing the lights or getting them closer to your plants will reduce this habit to reach the light source.

If your already running your light at their max power, then you can reduce the amount of plants in your grow-space, to increase overall lightning.

If stretch issues are persistent, you can try to lower the amount of nutrients in the water.

When stretching, your plant will consume lot of nutrients. By reducing the feeding ratio you'll be able to slow the flowering stretch.

⚠⚠⚠
This method is controversial, giving the right amount of nutrient is a complex thing, the aim of this method is to reduce the nutrients so there is no extra feeding giving the minimum food ratio, not to starve your plant during the flowering process.

Try the other options before trying this one. This is also why we recommend switching your plant to bloom before it reach 50% of your grow space height.

Using training techniques will help your to fully control your plant stretch and create an adequate canopy to maximize your final yields.

It consist in controlling your plant height and shape to provide a better light penetration and rise bud spots percentage to increase yields and quality.

There are many different training techniques to use to reduce height, here are the most common ones :

• Low Stress Training (LST, Supercropping, SCROG)
• High Stress Training (Topping, FIMing)

We made a video on how to train your plants, check it out 👇👇👇