Monster Cropping: 5 Things That You Need To Know

The Monster Cropping technique takes the flowering clones of the plant and reverts them to the vegetative phase. This technique saves you the effort of keeping a mother plant for continuous harvesting. Monster cropping is a valuable technique for growing plants outdoors, indoors, and in the greenhouse.

Keep in mind, results often vary depending on the plants’ genetics. Yields might not always be excellent. but let’s look at all of these things you must know about Monster cropping!

Monster Cropping for Cannabis

If done correctly, nearly every plant training technique works on the principle of stress. Properly using controlled stress allows plants to flourish with desirable characteristics. Do you want to develop some extra bud sites? Or do you want to grow your plant in a distinct shape?

In cannabis plants, applying controlled stress can trigger their natural defenses. This sends plants into the turbo mode and encourages them to produce more aromatic yield. You can use monster cropping on photoperiod cannabisstrains only because they will take time to recover when plants go through considerable stress.

Not for Autoflowers

While monster cropping is an excellent technique, sometimes it doesn’t work - for example, in the case of auto flowers. Autoflowers cannot revert to their vegetative stage once they have started flowering, so there is no way to make them revert to the vegetative stage.

Autoflowers have no inbuilt mechanism that reacts to the light schedule. No matter how much light you expose them to, they will follow their inner clock and do things accordingly.

Advantages of monster cropping

Let’s look at some pros of using the monster cropping technique!

Save your preferred genetics

You often realize late that you want to save the genetics of a particular plant. Once a plant has flowered, you can no longer go for standard cloning. But guess what? You still have the chance to save the genetics using monster cropping.

No Need for a Mother Plant

If you work with clones, then you must keep a mother plant to provide you cuttings when needed. You might need a different space which can be a hassle, however, with monster cropping you can use a cutting from your existing plant to grow a new one.

Use multiple clones

Monster cropping provides you with such branch plants that pruning them won’t affect their growth rate or health. Hence, you can have as many clones as you need.

High yields

With monster cropping, your plant will develop numerous branches, and hence you have the chance to cultivate many bud sites. This can do wonders for your harvests and yield excellent results.

Things To Keep in Mind for monster cropping

Now let’s cover some disadvantages of monster cropping that you may not like much!

All clones will not root

For the flowering branches to root, the conditions must be perfect in every aspect - and still, they might take time. To ensure you don’t get disappointed, plant at least 25% extra cuttings.

It takes times

Rooting your clones in monster cropping is longer than your typical 5-7 days and is more like 3 weeks. In that time, the cuttings will go back from budding to vegging, even more time-consuming.

Challenging to work with short varieties

Monster cropping tends to make any strain extremely compact and dense. While this might not be that much of an issue for the bigger strains, the shorter ones might be difficult to handle.

Outdoor monster cropping gets tricky

If you plan to try out monster cropping outdoors, it might get tricky. You can only carry this out if all the conditions are perfect and the climate is warm and sunny. At the end of the winter, you can plant your first-generation plants to have enough time to flower.

As spring approaches, take the flowering cuttings and root them. The next step is re-vegging under natural or artificial light. When days are long enough, your clones will be vegging again. The flowering will start somewhere near the end of the summer and finish by the fall. This is when you will get your second yield.

Conclusion

Monster cropping takes longer than usual cloning but yields higher results. While many people would want to know precisely how better the yields can get, it is difficult to say.

But when you think about it, the fact that you can harvest multiple times is one massive advantage.