growing a sativa in limited space, removing excess colas?

Ive ben growing a bagseed sativa that i really like but i let it grow like 9 colas and defoliated a lot to keep it under control. however it didnt grow too fat. i think it was mostly due to the fact i had too many colas and cut the fan leaves off the main stalk for most of those colas. so my question is what if i prune most of the cola stems off my next grow but leave their main stalk fan leaves. will they help their non-associated cola sites fatten up or do they only help the colas that grow off the top of them? my idea was to have like 1 or 2 main colas and only a few mini 1-2 inch offshoots and hopefully get fatter buds from what grows.

i know another thing that affected my grow was i was relying on ffof soil nutes and didnt use enough addative nutes to help so i was going to use the technaflora recipe at start of flower this time with some recycled ffof soil that should basically be clean of the builtin organic nutes.

btw im growing in a supercloset superbox. they can grow to almost 2 feet tall and using a feliz 2700k 10,000 lumen 200w cfl. i have gotten before 2x 1/2 oz indica hybrids and a late finisher sativa giving 2 oz and taking over the entire box that had like 15 colas growing out of control on my very first grow but moved halfway across the country and now im growing new strains.

with this sativa im pretty sure its a landrace mexican sativa. it smells piney and finished in 8 weeks which i thought was odd for a sativa but now that i know this i want to keep it for now

Wow, I had to read that a few times lol. Fan leaves will be more than happy to help out another bud site. Its a whole plant, all its energy is used equally throughout the whole plant. Its kind of like a Mexican family living in one house. Pablo is the bud site, Raul is the fan leaf. If Pablo gets killed, Raul is still going to do his same amount of work, but more of the benefits of work will go to his Mami and Papi and his brothers, sisters, cousins, and all the other 80 family members that live in his house because Pablo isn't there to benefit from Raul anymore

Cool so if there are too many Raul's than jobs (light in this case) I take it the plant will shed them as necessary but not until it sucks the nutrients and whatnot out of them? Or can that have at all a negative impact on the bud growth?

Here's my next round, just put her into flower....




and here's what the other looked like about halfway through flower:


I ended up pulling ~1/2 oz off her....and she didn't grow anywhere near the CFL...hopefully with improvement I should be able to double that.

put the CFL closer and move it as the plant grows
a scrog screen would make your life alot easier i pulled 38g with a sativa dominant hybrid using 3 36w cfls

I had thought about it but given the box gets cramped ok like to pull the plants out of it to water and train

put a scrog screen attached to the pot that way you can still take the plant out