Pruning after turning lights to 12hr and budding

[jasonYeg]

Can i prune after ive switched the lights to 12 hours and budding starts?..This is my first hydroponic and it really got away on me. I switched the lights to 12s about a week ago..its too bushy now.

 

[JIMKSI64]

Can i prune after ive switched the lights to 12 hours and budding starts?..This is my first hydroponic and it really got away on me. I switched the lights to 12s about a week ago..its too bushy now.

Wow impressive mess you got there.
Start at the bottom and work up. Remove lower internodal sprouts that will be more than 15 inches lower than the tops as they will not have enough light. My guess is that you will have to top or supercrop some tall stems to get a level canopy. You will also have to clean up any fan leafs that will obstruct light along the bud runs.
You will want to be done with defol 3 weeks after pistles first appear when stretch ends.
Good luck.

 

[jasonYeg]

Wow impressive mess you got there.
Start at the bottom and work up. Remove lower internodal sprouts that will be more than 15 inches lower than the tops as they will not have enough light. My guess is that you will have to top or supercrop some tall stems to get a level canopy. You will also have to clean up any fan leafs that will obstruct light along the bud runs.
You will want to be done with defol 3 weeks after pistles first appear when stretch ends.
Good luck.

Thank you for this..getting to work on it today.

 

[phxazcraig]

You have problems coming unless you can move that light up 2-3 feet. Once the flower stretch starts, your space will vanish quickly. When your space (to canopy) gets short, you'll have coverage issues to the sides. That can result in burning the center to get the edges right.

Have a look in my old thread 'Explosive Growth in Coco Coir' for what happened to me in very similar circumstances. (I may be there again with my current crop.)

Don't worry too much about cropping now. It's still not too late. I'd would immediately crop your tallest buds as I'm pretty sure they are going to explode into the light if left alone. Remember that the height of your plants will probably double during flower stretch, as much as an inch a day. Some plants will stretch more than that.

Which will help you decide what to trim. Figure a maximum depth from top of canopy of 15 inches down for decent buds. Stuff below that won't have enough light to succeed, but it will waste some energy trying to grow. If you decide where the top of the canopy will be - hang a net there - you can measure down 15 inches and see about where your canopy thickness becomes ineffective. Lollipop trim below that, for parts of the plant you know will not be getting taller. (Some branches will grow upward a bit at the bottom, but mostly they stretch (evenly?) with the tops getting a lot taller and the bottoms hardly moving.

I lay on the floor looking up into the leaves. My first targets, and probably the safest to cut, are those '98 pound weakling arms'. You know, the leaves and stems with obviously spindly thickness. They will never get enough light, so can be trimmed now. That usually includes some side branches coming out from near the base of the plant and unsuccessfully trying to fight through to the top of the canopy. They will never get there. Cut them now.

As for big leaves on top, I usually leave them unless they are shielding 2-3 growth sites. But I think they are doing the most work in growing the plants, so I'm more likely to trim leaves underneath than the top ones.

I grow 4 plants in a 4x4, so I'm also aggressively attacking edges of one plant trying to grow into the space of another. Here I favor the smaller plants by cutting back the larger one.

This is about your last chance to truly shape the plant, particularly to keep it shorter. I'd crop the taller parts to get the height under control - they will produce two shoots each, or at least get better buds lower down.

Once the plant is flowering, you trim leaves very strategically, if they are shading something important. But also, dying leaves at the end of flowering can provide some of the nutrients the plant needs then.

Also, I grow in Arizona, harvesting in May or June. This means real problems in the drying stage because I cannot keep temps down and humidity up - my plants want to be bone dry after 2-3 days. To slow down the drying process, I leave my buds a little bit leaf-heavy when wet trimming, and I leave a fair amount of stem on the buds as well. The stem really slows down the drying time. It requires close supervision to keep the plants drying slow enough without going to far, or bagging/jarring them up too soon and risking mold.