I just read through the entire thread. Wish I'd picked it up at the beginning.
Great thread.
More pics and posts!!! If anyone complains that you're over posting on your own thread they can suck it. Your plants look great. I like seeing and reading about your progress.
I think the reason why I was compelled to read was that you seem just so damn nice. Like a very cool guy to know.
I've grown for several years. Not great, but my budget was abysmal and genetics were poor, so you're already doing better than I probably ever did. Not growing currently due to certain circumstances, and it makes me sad. After having your garden up and running for years, seeing it dismantled and stopping a grow is painful. It's like I killed a friend.
So anyway the one thing I was really good at was cloning. >98% success rate over several years of having a continually running personal garden of 6-12 plants at a time. Cloning at least every other week.
I'm a few beers in, so let me try to get to the point. On your next flowering period go ahead and cut a few of the lower branches for cloning. From the looks of it you had plenty of greenery this time.
Why? Well for evil science experiments of course. You sound like you've got the passion for growing so expand on that. Try shit out, don't be afraid of killing plants, as long as it's for experimentation. There's always a fear of doing anything different when you're first starting out, but I think that's a mistake. You have to try things you're not sure about, see how it goes, then introduce changes to your main garden and see how that goes.
Supercropping is scary, until you snap a main stem and watch it repair itself. How about trying some LST first? I really enjoyed the results from LST. You could simply bend things over without breaking them and create an even canopy with some constant adjustments. It's a helleva lot more work than just letting them go natural, but when space becomes an issue, it's a good thing to know.
I used these for manipulating the branches, worked great!
Ok, done.