Hey; sorry to take so long to respond from the last talk. Was out of town for a few days working. You can top your plants and then use the tops as cuttings for clones. However, this is a bit more of a challenge as the tops of the plants have a lot of growth hormone which induces leaf growth, rather than root growth. It will take some time for the cutting to revert its hormones over to produce roots(rooting gel or cloning gel helps).
It will take considerably longer to get the tops to root and your chances of failure are higher. But it can be done and is done all the time. You will want to take the cutting so that you have enough to plant the stem so that a node(with the leaves removed) is at the bottom of the cutting, and get some cloning gel to put on it before planting it. As for the lower plant, it will do just fine, and it will bush up more after topping it.
As for your lights, You are fine to use CFL for starting out, and for vegging, and even for flowering if you have to. But because the CFL lights don't throw enough light energy at the plant, you will have to greatly increase the amount of bulbs you are using as the plant grows and demands more energy. Once in flower, she will need at least 5000lumens of red/orenge spectrum light to produce maximum bud growth.
Your plants look well but are very stretched out just now. This is most likely because of the inefficiency of the CFL bulbs. If you want to top them to make clones, that is ok but if you want to greatly increase your plant's ability to produce a lot of buds and get many good clones, you will need to make them bush out. You can do this through topping as that encourages the lower limbs to grow and creates 2 top colas, while also slowing verticle growth.
I would suggest that, rather than topping now, you tie the top of the plant and gently bend it over some and increase the bend every other day until it is nearly horizontal. leave it tied(loosely to prevent strangling) and let it restablish new side growth. once the top of the plant turns up and starts its vertical growth, you could top it then, which would twin the meristem.
You can continue to tie it and then tie its branches over to create a very bushy plant from which you can take as many cuttings as you like for clones.
I usually take cuttings about 1-2weeks before placing the plants into flower.
Controlling the humidity can be a challenge depending on your environment. I grow inside a dedicated room that is both vented to remove heat and replace CO2, and I have a dehumidifier that I use to maintain 55-65% all the time. You shouldn't allow your room to stay above 75%RH for anything other than clones. Maintaining the humidity will be a matter of maintaining your local grow environment.
