If you are an indoor plant lover and wish to maintain the aesthetics of your indoor space, you might be concerned with the height of your little indoor garden plants.
Plants, especially those intended for ornamental or indoor use, rarely develop as tall as they would like. Owners of such plants desire them to be short or a certain height and bushy.
Don’t worry if you’re new to this hobby of maintaining indoor plants and wondering how to stop plants from growing tall.
If you came across this post by accident and are curious as to why you should modify the height of your plant instead of allowing them to develop as freely as possible, there are several reasons why you should do so.
How To Stop Plants From Growing Tall
Fortunately, several tried and trusted techniques for controlling plant growth and preventing them from growing too tall. Low-stress technique, fimming, and topping are just a few of them.
Stopping plants from growing tall can sometimes be as simple as lowering the water or fertilizer they receive. When you reduce the amount of water and fertilizer given to a plant, you are likely to expose it to illnesses and stunted growth.
Let’s have a look at some additional, maybe less dangerous, ways to keep plants from growing too tall without endangering their health.
Method 1: Perform Topping on The Plants
Topping or Scionification means that you remove the terminal bud on top of the plant with a knife. By doing this, you are stopping the plant’s apical dominance. Once apical dominance is stopped, lateral buds will grow in their place and multiply.
You may have to do it several times before the process yields results, but when it does, the plant will be shorter than before. It is done when you want to create more side branches on your plant or redirect energy away from the upper regions of the stem to lower ones.
Topping V/S Fimming
Topping is similar to fimming, but it’s performed on plants about 12 to 18 inches tall and has three or fewer nodes or branch levels. Topping is a typical method of preventing plants from growing excessively tall and involves taking the growth shoot’s top center.
Procedure to Follow
Remove the center of the growing shoot, leaving a few centimeters or a quarter-inch of stalk above the top branch line. This is important since a new development spot has been developed, and instead of the previous stalks, a new point will branch out into several stalks.
Method 2: Low-Stress Training (LST)
LST is outstanding for its simplicity. The plant is trained in a slow, low-stress manner once it reaches a height of 6 inches. You do not have to use any tools or implement any drastic measures to achieve the desired results.
How to Perform LST?
What you need are your hands and a few minutes each day. All you have to do is bend, push, turn, weave, fit, clamp, twist, or tie the stem of your plant to train it into a certain shape.This is an important step if you’re growing multiple plants in the same pot.
Right Amount of Pressure is the Key
The trick with LST is to avoid hurting roots and stems but still influencing their growth patterns without providing too much pressure on them. You can do this by tying thick twists onto the stem without cutting into it.
If you have a large container or pot, you may lay down about 2 inches of the plant’s stem. This method encourages more bud sites to develop on the plant than if you had not trained it with low stress.
Method 3: Fimming
Fimming is also known as pinching, nipping, and occasions removal of the apical meristem (new growth at nodes). The apical meristems are the areas of new growth on lateral branches.
These buds will develop in a similar way to how they were formed on the main stem. But instead of one new shoot, you will have two shoots that share one node or stem.
Fimming V/S Topping
Topping and fimming are both accomplished in the same manner. To fim, you must follow the path of topping. To carry out fimming, however, you must go via the process of topping. Instead of chopping off the new growth shoot, though, you instead chop halfway down the stem and slice 