First Grow: Did I prune too much? Should I prune any more?

I started with (6) Mendo Breath clones in 10 gallon pots, read up on super cropping / LST and started getting hands on with them every day. I moved to 30 gallon pots and despite my first time doing it, my attentiveness and all your input has helped greatly with healthy plays. They started to flower about 2 weeks ago and I went in with my scissors and starting cutting the stuff that looked like it would just be popcorn buds.

At this point, should I be removing more internal fan leaves or just let it be?

Thanks!

garbagemeats said:

I started with (6) Mendo Breath clones in 10 gallon pots, read up on super cropping / LST and started getting hands on with them every day. I moved to 30 gallon pots and despite my first time doing it, my attentiveness and all your input has helped greatly with healthy plays. They started to flower about 2 weeks ago and I went in with my scissors and starting cutting the stuff that looked like it would just be popcorn buds.

At this point, should I be removing more internal fan leaves or just let it be?

Thanks!

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Looks just about perfect to me buddy!

Where are you? Seems very early to see flowering starting. I’m in north central Oregon and i generally don’t see signs of flowering for at least two weeks.

lollipopping looks good! Your canopy looks nice and full.
ive supercropped, LST and lollipopped SS well. Your plants look a lot like mine!

I’ve contemplated thinning out the canopy and removing some of the minor branches reaching up into the canopy, with the thought of fewer tops to feed I get bigger buds
If I do it’ll be before August 1 to give the plants plenty of time to recover and grow vigorously again.

Joedank said:

Looks just about perfect to me buddy!

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I generally don’t mess with my plants after the second week into flower unless I really have to.

petert said:

Where are you? Seems very early to see flowering starting. I’m in north central Oregon and i generally don’t see signs of flowering for at least two weeks.

lollipopping looks good! Your canopy looks nice and full.
ive supercropped, LST and lollipopped SS well. Your plants look a lot like mine!

I’ve contemplated thinning out the canopy and removing some of the minor branches reaching up into the canopy, with the thought of fewer tops to feed I get bigger buds
If I do it’ll be before August 1 to give the plants plenty of time to recover and grow vigorously again.

Click to expand...

Yeah I’ll second that looks good and I’m curious as well as to your latitude/longitude. it is kinda early to have flowers, strain dependent of course. Looking good though man!

looks great so far.

petert said:

Where are you? Seems very early to see flowering starting. I’m in north central Oregon and i generally don’t see signs of flowering for at least two weeks.

lollipopping looks good! Your canopy looks nice and full.
ive supercropped, LST and lollipopped SS well. Your plants look a lot like mine!

I’ve contemplated thinning out the canopy and removing some of the minor branches reaching up into the canopy, with the thought of fewer tops to feed I get bigger buds
If I do it’ll be before August 1 to give the plants plenty of time to recover and grow vigorously again.

Click to expand...

I am in Northern California (about an hour north of San Francisco). I think the plants are starting to flower because they are bunching up (getting more dense) and getting a few more hairs near what looks like the bud sites but maybe I am misreading it. Don't plants start to flower around this time in this area?

That is exactly what I was wondering about, those smaller internal branches that shoot up from the bottom to the top of the canopy. I cut back a handful but not all of them but not all.

Thanks for all your feedback, I really appreciate it!

Generally they’ll start to flower depending on strain when the daylight hours get noticeably shorter. For Oregon that’s in the 14 hours a day range. Generally for me that’s after the first week of August. Right now I’m still just about 15 hours a day.

I've talked to several other experienced growers and they like me, are on the fence about thinning out tops. I may just experiment with one or two plants, but in theory it should work just like lollipopping works! I’ll try to snap some closer up pics to show you what I’m talking about, just so we’re on the same page.

It’s kinda hard to show in these pictures, hopefully you’ll get the idea. the canopy is full, but there is good air flow, plus it’s very breezy where I live. The branch I have my hand on is a shoot off the main stem from right where I stopped lollipopping and it extends up into the canopy. It’ll provide decent buds, but my thinking is if I thin out about 25% of these “secondary” colas the main colas will recurve more food from the plant and produce fewer but bigger buds.
danger of that is fewer bigger nugs the more you lose if you get bud rot.