wannabefarmer
Member
So then it would seem to me that it would only make sense to trim leaves and see how a plant responds to manipulate how buds and colas will actually grow.
Trimming Fan Leaves a Consensus Part 1
- Thread starter mogie
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varscience21
Well-Known Member
I'd love to see pics of this. I am not really sure if you are talking about a scrog method or what. Also what size area and how many plants because according to my math you said about 10 of the 50 buds you had were roughly and oz. to half an oz. and the rest an 1/8 to a quarter. If you take the average of those numbers you end up with roughly 17 oz.s which in my mind would mean alot of small plants for a scrog method so just wondering what size area your using because if your able to get that kind of results out of flouros thats amazing. Anyway just curious about size of room and how many plants.
varscience21
Well-Known Member
My oppinion about trimming is this if you have the room and the lights intesity let the plant be, otherwise only trim prior to onset(flowering) and during flowering only pull leaves if there dead or dying. I have read quite a few grow books and forums on this subject and have even experimented with it myself and trimming a bunch of leaves off your plants during flowering does not improve yield. The only reason those people are seeing bigger yields is one they have to flower longer to make up for the time the plants stops growing due to extreme stress of chopping off a bunch of leaves therefore giving more time for the flowers to thicken up. Two they do not have enough light intesity in the first place to flower a planto adequately and therefore need to chop off a bunch of leaves for the lights to penetrate the lower canopy making it seem like in the end they are getting a higher yield but the fact of the matter is that if they had the right light intesity in the first place they would have nof clue what there yield could be because they just say if I didnt cute off those leaves my colas would be small because the leaves are blocking the light from reaching the bud. But the truth of the matter is I dont see how stressing the heck out of a plant would produce signifigantly higher yields. If you are going to chop off leaves do it at the beggining of flowering(onset) or the end flushing that way atleast the plants is not so stressed. In any expert grow books, journal, website, blog, I have yet heard them say that you should cute off the fan leaves that sade the lower buds. If it did make sense to do this then how do you explain in outdoor growing were no-one tries any higher yielding techniques are they able to produce plants that yield a pound or more and yes I know the sun is several times the lumen output of any growlight but neglecting that dont you think that nature knows how to do this a little bit better than man considering its been around considerably longer. Just think about it for a second if I came up to say a living creature a started tearing parts off of it would it do better or worse and yes I realize there is going to be some wise @ss whose like it depends one which parts and what creature but no it doesnt ripping parts off of any living for no reason is never a good thing.
wallstreet
Member
http://www.cannabisculture.com/v2/articles/2533.html
Trim leaves that shade buds, and thats it. And still I wouldn't trim if I were outdoor, but indoor if its a big leaf covering whole sections of branches and buds beneath- don't be afraid to clip it. Don't over-do it. Don't ever take most of the leaves and never take a leaf that isn't shading something you specifically want to grow.
Trim leaves that shade buds, and thats it. And still I wouldn't trim if I were outdoor, but indoor if its a big leaf covering whole sections of branches and buds beneath- don't be afraid to clip it. Don't over-do it. Don't ever take most of the leaves and never take a leaf that isn't shading something you specifically want to grow.
boatmandude
Member
How much area do you have with that lighting ?
Ill be real here by saying I do tuck the fan leaves under a bit to expose the buds, but its not for the "bud absorbs light" method - It's because I want my undergrowth the stretch up a bit. When the bud undergrowth is exposed to light it will grow towards it until it has sufficient lighting, by tucking, not cutting, the fan leaves it allows the lower growth, in my opinion, to grow higher.
On the other hand, I also have an experimental plant I am dubbing King Kong because it has buds on it the size of my head and it still has 3 weeks to go. Its the Big Bud strain - now from what I have seen in all Big Bud pictures, big bud looks like regular nuggets, no special colors etc. With this experiment, I let this bad boy be in organic soil and havent given it a drop of nutes since the first day after 24 hours of dark into flowering. The fan leaves shade the lower growth, but the lower growth is still pushing through the fan leaves as they grow and thicken. On a side note, I am using this plant to work on a little "wives tale" people talk about, although I've read that it is factual, that if you adjust your flowering to have colder nights your bud can turn purple - Experiment is a success and I can already see purple growth at the surface - I snipped off a little bit to examine it and yeah it starts from the inside and purples outward - if that makes sense.
Sorry to get off topic. lol
On the other hand, I also have an experimental plant I am dubbing King Kong because it has buds on it the size of my head and it still has 3 weeks to go. Its the Big Bud strain - now from what I have seen in all Big Bud pictures, big bud looks like regular nuggets, no special colors etc. With this experiment, I let this bad boy be in organic soil and havent given it a drop of nutes since the first day after 24 hours of dark into flowering. The fan leaves shade the lower growth, but the lower growth is still pushing through the fan leaves as they grow and thicken. On a side note, I am using this plant to work on a little "wives tale" people talk about, although I've read that it is factual, that if you adjust your flowering to have colder nights your bud can turn purple - Experiment is a success and I can already see purple growth at the surface - I snipped off a little bit to examine it and yeah it starts from the inside and purples outward - if that makes sense.
Sorry to get off topic. lol
DreamB0x
Member
Now even if this seems as a good argument I would strongly disagree here. The idea of growing indoors is to re-create nature! Lights imitate the sun, water imitates the rain, fans the wind. We even change specters to simulate season change for god's sake .. We try so hard to imitate nature in all sorts of ways. Now what does trimming simulate? An occasional critter braking off some leafs? I don't think so..
JAMES.BOND.007
Member
i would say maybe remove a couple if there in the way but thats it youll be glad of these fan leaves should you have any ph/nute/salts build up or lack of nutes like has been said the plant moves stuff about from fan leaf to bud so unless they are seriously getting in the way just leave them imo
midijunkie
Active Member
i know this is an older thead.. but heres my two cents related to my experience. these leaves can be compared to solar panels on the top of your house. the lightbulbs and toasters inside your house are still active at full power even though they are not receiving ambient power. this power is transfered to them via cabling in your house coming from a battery which is in turn powered by the sun (indirectly). if you were to separate leaves from the plant and put them outside on your roof and have them tied into buds below, they would only be as big as how much light the power source had to store (relatively speaking). pulling leaves is a bad practice in standard growing technique. if theyre yellow, let the plant take care of them to drop. ive nipped many leaves from one and left them on the other, the one that had none removed did much better as in yield, health, and overall appearance.
nature has a way of adapting to the best of the best in just about every aspect. if these flowers needed less leaves, then it would drop all fan leaves at the start of flowering. i myself, do not grow leafy strains. you must recreate nature in its entirety to each strains original growing conditions to really get A+ medicinal quality dope. these plants are like any living creature, i compare them often to my fish in my 150gallon.. if theyre reproducing, theyre happy. if the majority of those babies grow to at least a year, theyre ecstatic.
nature has a way of adapting to the best of the best in just about every aspect. if these flowers needed less leaves, then it would drop all fan leaves at the start of flowering. i myself, do not grow leafy strains. you must recreate nature in its entirety to each strains original growing conditions to really get A+ medicinal quality dope. these plants are like any living creature, i compare them often to my fish in my 150gallon.. if theyre reproducing, theyre happy. if the majority of those babies grow to at least a year, theyre ecstatic.
i've had 3 years growing experience...if your doing indoor and wanna yield more fuck wat people are saying about fan leaves and solar panels...sure the fan leaves give the bud energy and food. but i've had so many grow where i didn't prune fan leaves and just had all top colas and all the bottom ones were light green and fluffy. but when i prune some of the big fan leaves that's covering the middle and some of the leaves growing inward later on i have all the bottom nugs. so wat im saying is don't prune too much because if u do your colas will be small and fluffly and your more likely to get diseases. prune during second week when the bud are coming out and then another prune around 5 or 6 weeks.buds or leaves that do not get exposure to the light or sun stays light green and fluffy.so if you're doing INDOOR...PRUNE but keep it minimal...
Brick Top
New Member
Besides greatly reducing photosynthesis by removing healthy leaves you also reduce transpiration which means capillary action is decreased which means a reduced amount of water and nutrients can be taken in by roots and transported up plants. If you remove healthy leaves you limit your plants ability to take in and take up water and nutrients, so it is as if you put your plants on a diet, not allowing them to take in/take up and use as much water and nutrients as they otherwise would. If you limit capillary action you limit your plants ability to thrive.
Transpiration is the evaporation of water into the atmosphere from the leaves and stems of plants. Plants absorb soilwater through their roots. Plants pump the water up from the soil to deliver nutrients to their leaves. This pumping is driven by transpiration, the evaporation of water through small pores called "stomates", which are found on the undersides of leaves.
How Water and Nutrients are Transported
Transpiration is the evaporation of water into the atmosphere from the leaves and stems of plants. Plants absorb soilwater through their roots. Plants pump the water up from the soil to deliver nutrients to their leaves. This pumping is driven by transpiration, the evaporation of water through small pores called "stomates", which are found on the undersides of leaves.
How Water and Nutrients are Transported
- Transpiration is the water loss that occurs through the open stomata. This loss helps to draw water and nutrients up through the xylem from the root. Factors that affect transpiration are temperature, light intensity and duration, wind speed and relative humidity.
- Capillary Action - Water and nutrients moves from the root up to the leaf because of capillary action. This is an adhesive attraction between the water particles and the vessels inside the plant.
PendulumMan
Member
What idea of growing indoors? The basic concept of growing indoors (or outdoors) is the process by which you cause a marijuana plant to produce the greatest amount of weight in active constituents from the lowest amount of invested energy. There are many ways in which this can be achieved, the argument is which are better; but none of them are "natural." Plants come from nature, but the purpose we are applying to them DOES NOT, whether growing outdoors or indoors. Marijuana doesn't grow itself to produce large quantities of chemicals that are psychoactive in humans. Natural weed is full of thick stems and seeds, and is very low in resin. It sucks, straight up. When we apply an unnatural process (intention-directed breeding), we get the wonderful crystalline beauty of marijuana. Frankly, the idea of growing indoors/outdoors is to alter nature in an unnatural way to produce a fundamentally different result than what would ever occur in nature, not to re-create nature. We definitely learn a lot from watching the plant in its natural environment, the basics of what it needs to grow, the nature of advanced processes it has developed towards its directive (growth, reproduction, general sustainability), and we can look closer to also see the environments which encourage traits that are useful to our unnatural directive. We then use this knowledge to produce an environment with an unnatural purpose (psychoactive compound concentration/quantity), and thus the environment itself is fundamentally unnatural. This is all based on conjecture of what natural even is, though... Technically everything humans do is quite natural, thus all environments we create are also natural. The marijuana plant's amazing ability to adapt to any environment is what is most important, not the "natural" or "unnatural" nature of that environment.Now even if this seems as a good argument I would strongly disagree here. The idea of growing indoors is to re-create nature! Lights imitate the sun, water imitates the rain, fans the wind. We even change specters to simulate season change for god's sake .. We try so hard to imitate nature in all sorts of ways. Now what does trimming simulate? An occasional critter braking off some leafs? I don't think so..
That being said, there is no reason I can see that removing fan leaves which are providing less energy than they require to sustain/grow would do anything but help a plant. Plants naturally trim their own fan leaves when this occurs, but with very low efficiency due to various factors in their evolution (periods of darkness due to overcast, changing levels of light due to canopy, etc). It holds on to inefficient leaves for a fairly long period of time in case temporarily low illumination causes leaves to seem inefficient when actually they are beneficial in the long run and trimming them would waste energy. You need to take that into consideration when trimming: Is the blocked growth in an area that won't be shaded with a bit more stretching that may occur? If you take that into consideration, you've accounted for nature, and can now trim the fuck out of it to fine tune it's efficiency (as the plant does itself, but very inefficiently) and get the largest potential yield.
PendulumMan
Member
Original growing conditions? What does that mean? The growing conditions of the breeding rooms? It'd be pretty hard to know the conditions of the breeding rooms for every strain that was bred into any particular strain, therefore impossible to know the best conditions without experimentation. The best conditions are rarely very "natural" for strains which have gone through extensive breeding; they've adapted to do well under the unnatural conditions humans have subjected them to in order to get large quantities of the most potent buds. You could find a naturally growing strain in the jungle somewhere and try to replicate its environment exactly... I doubt you'll get much out of it, aside from a really tough & really pretty house plant.
yesum
Well-Known Member
I think the older fan leaves are less efficient than newer ones in all aspects of helping the plant along. So while it is true all the leaves serve a purpose and to trim them without regard is stalling the plants growth, removing some of the older ones that are blocking bud sites seems reasonable to me.
i'm trimming fan leaves this time around. i have bushy plants and they're blocking the lower branches and bud sites. in an previous grow, it seemed to help powdery mildew thrive. i understand they're like solar panels, but what good are they if they're shading everything under the top growth.
protectionracket
Member
1'st post good evening i have done this trimed the fans 3 weeks in to flower i'm at week 5 now,colas look like thay need a boost.why i did this i don't no.
is there any way to reverse the damage any feed back would welcome.
is there any way to reverse the damage any feed back would welcome.