No, don't do it. Defolition is a result of our loving a plant too much. Trying to beat mother nature is fools gold, regardless of how much human energy has been consumed to prove otherwise.
Do actual farmers go out and remove the solar panels from their plant, regardless of species? They dont. You shouldn't either.
O.K. So I've gone round and round about this defoliate thing. I generally do not. That's not to say I know what I'm doing. But I'm kinda siding with not defoliating. Oh I may remove some fan leaves from time to time but I feel you are removing solar panels. That's there job, right?
Recently I had a plant that developed an issue in which practically all the leaves browned up and fell off. The buds came out like pine cones. Great smoke. Gave some to a friend and he wanted to buy it all from me. But then, in retrospect, he buys everything I grow.
I just think, you cut, you stress.
You put all this loving into them. Checking nutes, lights, PH, heat. Then you cut there limbs off.
Now to argue the other way, I trim a lot of plants on my property. Rhododendrons I'll trim to fill in the bush. I'll trim trees to again have it fill in. I'll trim away trees around one tree I want to grow more.
But wait, the Rhodie, I know that if I trim properly I'll get more flowers next year. I also know, from experience, that if I trim too much the bush visibly stresses and the "yield" gets reduced. Worse yet, I'll kill it. It seems more effort is put into healing than flowering.
For most plants cutting away leaves and letting in light will promote growth to fill in that void to gather the light coming through it. Does that mean you cut away fan leaves to promote fan leaves?
Actually you’re wrong. If you don’t prune the suckers off tomato plants and excess foliage you get smaller fruit and it gets diseased faster. So..
But we promote that type of growth on pot plants. We top the plants in early development to push "suckers".
I'm not arguing or even just saying one way is better than another. I really want the best for my plants. I can only use what I do with my garden and advice on this site and cross my fingers.
But then, really, I don't want what's best for my plants, I want whats best for me.
