Side bines

Should side bones be trained after the get really long.....

Imo, train side shoots only to keep them from encroaching on an adjacent plant (and even then, if it's the same strain I might not bother). One goal of the plant is to blot out the sun, so it's going to send shoots off looking for open space to bask. Training tends to defeat that goal. Might be frustrating to the plant, who knows

Cheers!

A few of my plants have side arms that are 3' + in length. It would get way to cumbersome & clustered to attempt to train them all.

For some reason, your thread title made me think of this...



But seriously, when I grew hops I trained a few likely looking bines and cut the rest back.

I'll cut back anything near the ground, and train or trim anything that is trying to encroach on neighboring plants (different variety), but other than that I let the side arms do what the want. Of course, I'm not a pro, but I did harvest 18 wet oz of Zeus today.

I keep the first few inches from the ground leaf free a well and there is a strict 6 bine rule. No more then 6 bines are allowed to actually grow from the dirt or leaf free area. Anything past that gets rigorously trained. The entire length is about 15 feet high.and I've got side shoots so I try to tuck them in as well. Imba first time grower but all that I have done seems to be great for the plant.

Here are my questions with side bines:

1) If i have 2 first year plants with virtually no burs/cones, one is a bushy centennial at about 4 ft, the other a single tall nugget bine over 11 feet; wouldn't it promote more shoots to come up from the crown if i snipped the tips and/or side bines at this point in the season. i.e. the plant would refocus it's energy for next season with crown development?

2) I have a first year cascade with 9 side bines that went ~9 ft. and it will be a small but useful crop. My cones are approaching the 1-2 inch size, but recently there have been a lot of small side bines shooting out and up from about 1-4 feet off the ground. Again, wouldn't it be for the benefit of sending resources to the cones (or crown) if i snipped these seemingly useless late season side bines?

Thanks for the help in advanced!

I think the fact that they're throwing sidearms at this point probably indicates that they've already accumulated a ton of energy in the crown. It seems to me that some time after the plants have been busy flowering and once the days begin to get shorter, lots of excess growth begins to accumulate lower on the plants. I don't know if this is just excess energy being released after the majority of the growth has occurred or if it's a response of the excess energy being produced at this time being sent back down toward the crown. I have a graph somewhere that shows carbohydrate production throughout the season and seem to remember that it maintains a plateau for a while after flowering ~ can't find it at the time. I'd just leave everything 'as is' for the time being and allow them to die back naturally this Fall. You'll be really surprised next year when you see what, and how much comes up compared to this year. Forgot to mention, any foliage that's still green at this time is working hard to make more food to store for later. It's a pretty cool thing!

My grow set up is a little different than most peoples trellis, but Ive found pretty much all the cones I have are from sidearm growth. Id train the sidearms you have and clip any new sprouts the crown sends out. I have plenty of pics of it in the thread in my signature if its any help.