Took a little long for me to do this but I want to post my results for my Defoliation Experiment. Out of the 4 MDs I ran 2 were the control group which received no defoliation during flowering. The 2 from the experiment group were heavily defoliated on days 7 and 21. Striped of all fan leaves blocking bud sights.
Here's an example of my defol. 0n day 21.
One thing I noticed was that the defoliated plants seemed to stretch less. Appeared to stack tighter, but I think that is just an optical illusion because they have been stripped naked.
They were taken down on day 63 and given a week to hang dry until all the branches were able to snap and then I began trimming. One of the biggest factors for why I
won't be doing anymore defol in organic soil is because of trim time. It took me on average 30 minutes longer per plant to trim the bud from the defoliated group. Because I had striped away their major fan leaves, it caused them to grow more bud leaf and made it way harder to trim. This and factor in the time it takes to defoliate in flower and it is a losing proposition.
Final Weight in Grams:
Defoliation group- MD1 -107.5 MD3-131.5 total-239
Control group- MD2 -110 MD4-130 total-240
So basically no significant change in yield. However I spent at least 3-4 more hours of work pruning and then trimming the defol group. This is significant.
I also ran the same experiment on 3 purple storms in which I notice the same thing when trimming the finished product. It was much more time consuming to trim. The reason why I didn't consider the PS in the experiment is because they were very different in sizes to start with and only three of them.
Defoliation group- PS1- 107 PS2-97
Control group- PS3- 106
Wish I would have taken more pics towards the end, but I got a little too busy.