To cut of top healthy fans leaves or not?

[roxy002]

To me this seems so wrong. It's almost like butchering your plant to cut off green fan leaves from the top.

I've just had a heated debate about this with my partner I grow with. He has started taking top healthy fan leaves off, thinking that it would help light get to lower bud sites and help air flow.

I don't agree with this, and told him to stop, as we've spent weeks growing nice healthy leaves, which in turn feed the bud. He comes along and ruins the hard work...It doesn't make sense to me to interfere with mother nature like this.

I've read all different opinions on this. Some do it, and some don't. There doesn't seem to be a definitive answer on whether it is good or bad for the plant. Or is it one of those subjects that boils down to personal preference for individual grows?

 

[SonOfDaMourning]

trim from the bottom, the top growth is needed for continued constant growth. this is gonna hurt your size of buds hence your ultimate yield will suffer. yet when shoots become self sufficient and mature as seen in the # of shoots/leaves, size of the leaves and # of fingers, only then i feel more comfortable on trimming the shoot base leaf for more penertration but rarely do it unless i must. although keeping them will definently be the better decision if you have the space to space them out more efficiently.

 

[Dunge]

The question for me is when does an old leaf stop being a net gain to the plant?
I often recognize senescence start to hit the fans the last two weeks of development.
It's hard to believe they are still producing after turning fall colors.
They just look like shade.

 

[jagle]

trim from the bottom up. the only reason i would remove a leaf is if it is yellowing enough and has depleted the nutes stored in it.
if he is cutting top green healthy leaves to get the the lower ones the is wrong.

 

[dankworth]

I have a cultivar that likes to bust out a ton of fan leaves and form a "shell" over itself. The result of the shell is that the buds above the shell getting light(top 1/3-1/4 of cola) do just what they are supposed to. And everything under the shell is worse quality, and less weight.

To defeat the shell I have to do a vigorous fan leaf pluck in beginning of week 3 and week 8.
So I strip lots away right as the plant is growing budsites, so I expose these budsites to more light. She grows more fan leaves to replace the lost ones anyways.
And the week 8 strip is the beginning of flush. I need to de-shell her so that I get light to buds appropriately. The "bearing surface" of these colas must be exposed to a certain intensity of light to harden up and frost up appropriately. Leaving the shell would prevent me from getting as much premium quality material.

But then you see other strains like some ogs that seem like they don't need any fan leaf plucking at all. They just do not have enough fan leaves for them to actually be in the way.

Take the strain you work with, and let an example freestyle. That way you can see how the plant wants to behave, and what happens to the bud size and quality all up and down the plant. And then decide what to do from that.

That is how I have rolled for the last few years.

 

[Sasha]

Defoliation: Hi-Yield Technique

heres a couple links



or

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=174163