Fan leaves vs. Bud sites

I've always wondered, since the fan leaves grab the light and do the heavy lifting for the plant, what is the purpose of thinning them to create more light at the bud sites?
Is it the small fans and sugar leaves around the bud, or the big fan leaves at the nodes, that are giving the plant the most energy.
There's some articles out there, but I'm looking for experience.
One article continued on to why you flush the plant ... and well, that disqualified the author.

I don't trim them myself. I leave them to soak up the light and make the food the plant needs for maximum flower growth.

xtsho said:

I don't trim them myself. I leave them to soak up the light and make the food the plant needs for maximum flower growth.

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I thin out my plants if they are too robust and the tent gets crowded.
But is a fan leaf shading a bud a hinderance or a benefit?

drsaltzman said:

I thin out my plants if they are too robust and the tent gets crowded.
But is a fan leaf shading a bud a hinderance or a benefit?

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I think it's a benefit. But it's going to depend on your lighting. People these days like to hate on HID but they have really good penetration. The huge plants some are growing outdoors in real sunlight achieve huge buds without trimming any fan leaves.

I've seen extreme defoliation of all the leaves and I've never seen anything that was heavily defoliated come close to producing flowers the size of an un-defoliated plant given proper lighting. They may look cool but it doesn't increase yields.

There may be something of interest to you in this study:

I think I gotta agree with you.
My outdoor plants have grown large buds even down at the lower nodes.
But there must be some benefit to the buds getting more direct light indoors, since there are leaves intertwined with the bud, even if the large fans are the main engine.
I grow indoors with Timber COBs. They seem to have better penetration than the quantum boards I bought and sent back.

drsaltzman said:

I think I gotta agree with you.
My outdoor plants have grown large buds even down at the lower nodes.
But there must be some benefit to the buds getting more direct light indoors, since there are leaves intertwined with the bud, even if the large fans are the main engine.
I grow indoors with Timber COBs. They seem to have better penetration than the quantum boards I bought and sent back.

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Indoors you train to keep canopy even and by doing this you don’t over grow your lighting.

or if you get killer stretch with untrained plants then you thin the bottoms (lollipop) due to light levels not reaching down into the canopy.


this is 2 plants under a 400w woven into a scrog.

when you have a scrog you clean pretty much everything from under the scrog that isn’t receiving light due to the dense canopy.

I haven’t defoliated and look how many tops I have basking in the footprint.

That’s a nice looking scrog.
Lots of fans too.

From what I've read the fan leaves are the solar panels to the plant the more they have the more over light they can absorb in a given day. From the reading as well we want to leave the fan leaves on the bud site themselves as you want a good power source for that bud site. I have little experience but from it and the reading I think that during vegg the fan leaves have more opportunity to stay and you really only want to remove the ones that are too low and don't get light or that in the middle of the plants that obstruct the light penetration and airflow. I think defoliating or not defoliating is a very passionate topic for many so I decided to do experiment a little by defoliating more heavy on one that the others and what I noticed is that it grew taller maybe since there was less fan leaves it grew taller to get closer to the light source to compensate for the lack of solar panels. Regardless of the height the buds grew bigger and more dense it the sites where the fan leaves where led of or more where left in the area. The nice thing about the plant growing so tall was that the harv st was heavy and in all I still got big buds so it will probably take some experimenting. The way I sort of did it in vegg was I would use the fan leaves for a while until newer growth grew and didn't remove it until it was being a energy drain instead of a energy generator. Happy growing.