thinning?

[WaywardBob]

another ? for yall... im a little confused on the subject

in the MJ Growers Handbook by Ed Rosenthal it doesnt suggest removing fan leaves until they turn yellow and fall off because they are SUGAR FACTORIES! but ive seen growers here cut EVERYTHING off lower branches

ill find an example....

but what do you guys think? everything? or leaf the leaf

 

[Dr Dog]

I am sure that is true, but I look at it another way.

I do not get sufficient light penetration at the lower leaves, so I would prefer to have the plant concentrate on teh canopy and not at making popcorn, I also do it to increase airflow, the less leaves, the more airflow, the lower the humidity, and thus less problems

 

[Guest]

I'll go with the DOG and his approach, do the same here. You can benefit by scrogging.

 

[WaywardBob]

I am sure that is true, but I look at it another way.

I do not get sufficient light penetration at the lower leaves, so I would prefer to have the plant concentrate on teh canopy and not at making popcorn, I also do it to increase airflow, the less leaves, the more airflow, the lower the humidity, and thus less problems

my buddy's 4 plants are under 1kW hortilux. i know leaving lateral branching on lower nodes will waste plant energy, but will fan leaves do the same?

 

[WaywardBob]

I think I never pruned enough... The leaves are sorta cell-storage units though. The do have the potential to make the plant better but definitely with a point of diminishing returns.

thats why for right now, my friend has only removed the lateral branches and left ALL the fan leaves that havent yellowed, on

we've got some great input here, anyone else wanna chime in???

 

[Indica-420]

my friend cuts all the leaves and lower branches off " not sure exactly when" and has no probs but as for me im researching before i start a real grow "i have done the cfl" and didnt have good luck

hope that helps some or a lil

Indica-420

 

[Bozo]

I pick 6 tops to keep on most plants that have been topped and chop all others off @main stalk 1 week proir to flowering .Then I start plucking all the lowwer growth shoots off all the bracnhes and leave the fan leaves I stop pulling suckers 10-14 days into flower ..Pulling fan leaves before they are ready reduces yield I think. I have done it both ways and learned the hard way that tucking fan leave out of the way was a much better way to get light to all the tops and get good yeilds .So unless you are chopping the whole branch off @ main stalk I would tuck those problem leaves at the top out of the way and leave the lowwer ones alone till they fall off with a slight tug .Your plants will feed off of these leaves so dont cut them off just because there not getting much light think of them as a battery storing energy for when plant needs it in late flower

 

[goldenahms]

You're right, the leaves are sugar factories. That's why I think it's important not to fully remove the fan leaves.

I have seen many growers remove the lower branches. As to them, they are the smaller, less desirable buds. It'll increase the air flow under the plant. It also acts as does topping, multi shoots arise after the removal of the bottom branches.
Personally, I leave bottom branches intact.

I agree with Bozo, I tuck leaves around for light penetration. I usually let the leaves fall of by themselves unless they are really bad looking. I do pull many yellowing/dying leaves off though. A little yellow is okay.

 

[Maj.PotHead]

i trim all larger fans that block lower bud sites i leave the top 2-3 large fan leaves, anything trimmed is replaced by the smaller leaves when they grow out. i use botanicare sweet organic carbohydrate synthisizer its main ingredient is cane sugar

 

[Guest]

My thoughts are:

Do major pruning/trimming/topping/supercropping as early as possible during veg which allows the plant to recover better from the stresses involved.

Leave the BIG lower fans alone as long as possible. Trim off any shoots trying to delevop, but leave the big fans alone as long as you can.

These big fans provide the plant with onboard Nitrogen and other nutients that the plant needs. They are readily available. So if you are shorting the plant on nute or overdoing it. Many times that will show in those lower fans. You'll have a clue what to do about it.

Those big fans become less important as the plant matures and begins to die. That's when I feel OK about removing more of the lower growth.

pedro's newbie perspective

 

[Guest]

In early veg I select the tops I want (for topped plants - obvioulsy if the plant is not topped or LST'd I jst want the one top lol) I then cut off all other branches at the main stalk, then remove all side shoots etc from all lower parts of the plant, I remove any fan leaves that aren't getting light bt leave ones that are getting light, then as the plant recovers during the period of veg before flowering I continue to remove any annoying lil shoots that develop, no touching those fan leaves tho. A plant brings nutes from its roots uo, so the less branches using nutes on the way up means the more nutes for the top of the plant! Trust me, its a good way to look at it, bt those fan leaves create sugars and will b used in late flowering so they're still important ... This is a great method to increase yield whilst using less space!!!

Hope this helps, cheers.

 

[greenhead]

I still can't believe that nobody has ever tried to grow out a plant with zero leaves on it. I don't believe that I've ever seen that in any grow journal. If I ever get a bigger space, then I will certainly sacrifice one plant and test that out to see what happens. I'll veg it normally, then trim 100% of the leaves off a little after 12/12 begins.

 

[TGT]

This is my personal opinion on the matter of trimming and removing leaves and branches. From the many grows I have done with the same AK47 clone, I have had the advantage of seeing what methods seem to work best in different situations with a fairly consistant and controlled environment. This by no means includes every strain as I have only done multiple grows with this single specimen, but in doing so I found out some interesting things that make me wonder if they pertain to other strains as well.

What I did with my first few crops was do a little thinning and not much else. I got a great yeild, but it included a lot of small stragglers that would only be good for making oil or hash as they were much too small to include in the final product. I kept on this way for a few crops when I noticed that with the style of grow that I utilize, the bottoms third or so of vegatation was never getting enough light. I decided to take off the bottom quarter of stems, leaves and growth so that I would have better air circulation and hopefully yeild more bud.

My hypothesis was that the extra energy would effectively be sent to the budding tops and ultiumately create a larger yeild. I found my final weight increased slightly, but not enough to convince me that the practice was useful. I did get a better ratio of large to small buds, but didn't see the increase in bud size like I had hoped for and yeild stayed practically the same. In these few grows I always used the same clones, number of plants, same lighting, nutrients ect. It was as controlled as I could make it at the time. Even the temperatures stayed fairly consistant with little fluctuation.

After these tests I realized it was still in my best interest to remove the bottom fourth of growth. Not to increase bud size or yeild, but only to prevent a lot of work trimming and not create a bunch of small useless buds. Unfortunately I am not a hash or oil maker so these little buds just annoy me to no end.

I continued to grow my AK47 crop as I thought was most efficient until one day I grew my plants a little too large and they needed to be staked. I didn't have any bamboo sticks so I used what I had at the time. Unfortunately it was 1 inch by 1 inch thick pieces of wood that were laying around after a small renovation project I had completed some time earlier. As I pushed them into the soil I could here the roots tearing all the way to the bottom of the pot. I thought nothing of it at the time and figured no harm would be done.

The next day to my suprise some of the leaves looked dead as I entered the grow room. When I went to inspected them further I noticed something odd had happened. There were whole sections of the plant that died with other parts of it that were as healthy as could be. Obviously I damaged the roots piercing the soil by using such thick lumber, but the interesting thing was the outcome. It was as though this proved that certain root systems are responsible for independent parts of the plant and not the plant as a whole. One plant originally had four nice stems branching out of the main stock about three inches from the base, but after the staking three were healthy and one was completely dead.

This is only one example, but the same thing happened to many of them and from what I saw that day it seemed to indicate that the roots do not work as a whole. I went upstairs feeling rather depressed I had damaged my beautiful plants but was happy to have learned something new.

That night I was sitting at the dinner table and thought back to my experiments on trimming when I realized something interesting. If the roots work independently and not as a whole, then it would seem that trimming bottom branches would in turn kill the roots just as I had killed certain portions of the plant by damaging the roots. The rest of the roots would continue working like usual, but you would not reap any benefits as those roots that supplied the cut branches with nutrients would in turn die and not be able to supply other parts of the plant for which they were not intended.

I could be totally wrong, but never-the-less these are the results from the trimming that I observed with the strain AK47 and a silly hypothesis that I had to include. So basically I have found that chopping the bottom third or fourth of growth from the plant didn`t produce a larger final yeild in my case, but did decrease the amount of work trimming and increased the air circulation. This is only my experience and it could be that other strains are more likely to have different results as I have read from other members. Thank you all for letting me blab my face off tonight and sorry for such a long winded response.

TGT

 

[Guest]

I kinda disagree wif TGT on the root/leaf thing ... Not in anyway saying he is wrong, coz wat happened happend bt i fully cut my plants roots back (for my bonsai mother plants) and cut roots back if i dnt want a plant to get to big or it is root bound and i dnt want to pot it up jst yet, and even with severly hacking the root ball back I've never had any part of the plant die or even look ill ... bt maybe if ur wooden stake crushed and mushed some roots up u could hav got root rot or some other infection that caused ur plant to die back a bit ... root damage/removal has never caused problems for me (n my personal experience)

 

[jerome garcia]

would love 2 see a thread like that
will be lookin 4 it

 

[TGT]

Dr. Greenfinger, you have a good point. I too have kept mothers and hacked the roots when transplanting and nothing happened adverse to the plant - so it kind of goes against what I noticed with the staked plants I wrote about above. I didn't really think of that. I wonder if it could be different in my situation because I could have took out the entire root stran and not just cut the ends off? Obviously this needs to be done again properly to see what the results are under a controlled experiment. Mine was just a single observation so it doesn't hold much weight, just kind of gave me the idea to ponder. Thanks for your input and bringing up that important point.

TGT

 

[Guest]

I have made the mistake of being overzealous on my trimming. On an experimental 6 plant crop, I left 3 plants to grow wild, and with the other 3 plants I only left the top 3 sets of fan leaves to survive and everything else on the plants got the chop. The wild ones far out did the trimmed plants in yield, growth, etc. Although that was a wack way to grow plants, just wanted to see how far I could take it.

On a large SCROG grow, I overtrimmed the fan leaves and under the canopy and my crop couldnt make it to week 8. I had to harvest early because the plants died. Yield and quality suffered.

Now I play it safe and do not remove a leaf unless the plant removes it first. I just dispose of leaves really. I'm sure there has to be a balance between the two extremes, but I am not aware of it and bushes are fine by me.

N dubbya

 

[m@rg]

this was at about 8 days of flower
there are 3x more bud sites underneath all the leaves
gonna be crowded ,but i dont touch a single leaf until harvest
a little fighting over the light wont hurt ,more than plenty of lumens to go around

tucking is the best resort,if u think they need the light

 

[WheelsOG]

Wow^ Things might get a little crazy with that grow

 

[JackOneill]

I have always trimmed and the grow I am currently tending to is my 6th personal grow and the first time I have decided to just leave the plants alone and only pick up the dead leaves that happen to fall off. If you think about it in nature the plants wouldn't do better without less of itself so do yourself a favor and stop trimming and just get some proper light in your grow rooms. I can look up through the bottoms of my mj bushes and I can see light getting all the way to the bottom no problem. It is all about proper setup.