Can i trim the fan leafs?

hey guys, i have three females that have been flowering for about two weeks now and i was wondering if its benificial to trim off all of the fan leaves. they are taking up alot of space and if i trimmed them the buds would be getting alot more light. are the fan leafs important for the flowering portion of the cannabis life cycle or can i just cut em off?

Leave the leaves, the buds need them. Let them fall off by themselves and they will closer to harvest.

cool thanks for the info!

i was wondering the same thing should i take off fan leaves to let more light in
at first i did and diddnt see much improvement it seemed to slow growing a bit. then i started to cut half the leave off the tips it lets light in and grows more side branches. try this to one plant see if it makes a difference.
does anyone else do this or tried this?

i always leave at least 1 full pair of leaves on top

yeah i trimmed all of the large fan leafs off of one of my plants that turned out to be a hermie!! it was a mistake!! the plants buds grew a shitload slower than the rest of plants so obviously the fan leafs are needed to produce big buds.. so im glad i listened to you guys and didnt trim up the rest of my plants!!!

You can take one or two off to open the canopy up a little bit for light penetration, but I would not take them all off.

I don't know where the idea that you trim off the leaves so the buds can get more light; that's just plain stupid. It's the leaves that do the job of photosenthesis, not the buds.

potpimp said:

I don't know where the idea that you trim off the leaves so the buds can get more light; that's just plain stupid. It's the leaves that do the job of photosenthesis, not the buds.

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Have you noticed that when you remove only a few key fan leaves the shutes grow right to the top of the canopy? You can remove a few leaves for good light penetration, but definately do not remove all of them.

The lower fan leaves will yellow and die anyway. There are usually two sets of leaves, one on top of the other. The bottom one will almost invaribly die first. These are the only ones I remove.

i agree, with a plant that has been topped or lst'd, ive always removed the huge fan leaves blocking my canopy shoots.

does it help? i think it does, ive left plants alone with the huge leaves covering my canopy shoots, and those shoots developed really small buds, i think because the new shoots leaves were being blocked by the huge fan leaves.

Am i wrong? could be..... but it seems to work for me, so i'll continue to do it

My 2 cents

~BBA

bba said:

i agree, with a plant that has been topped or lst'd, ive always removed the huge fan leaves blocking my canopy shoots.

does it help? i think it does, ive left plants alone with the huge leaves covering my canopy shoots, and those shoots developed really small buds, i think because the new shoots leaves were being blocked by the huge fan leaves.

Am i wrong? could be..... but it seems to work for me, so i'll continue to do it

My 2 cents

~BBA

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Agreed....

yeah i trimmed the very bottom two off of my large female about a week ago and that alone freed up alot of room for the grow..

hmm never thought of that i may try it out!!

K9will said:

You could also try bending the fan leafs out of the way, or tuck them against the stem, to let some light at the growing shoots.

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Very true, it really does help.

Yeah, you can bend almost all the fans leaves that you need to out of the way without removing them. I only removed one or two from my plants that were directly on top of a bud site.

I myself have just done a test with our last grow. 8 plants all fed the same and all in the same room. I pulled every shade leaf next to the stem from top to bottom on 4 plants and left the other 4 alone. 60 days later I havested. The only thing I found was the bud grew tighter to the stock with the leaf removed, By weight they came out within 9 grams of each other. with the stripped plants coming in a bit heavier. I am growing Cream sodica in soil under T lights. The plants that I left alone had larger buds on the tops. the other four seemed to be more uniformed.

Good luck

i just tuck the fan leafs and i put the nodes coming out the stem in front of it so it can hold the fan leaf down but the node also grows crazy fan leafs i got about 20 heads out of a 3 week old hashberry by bending and tucking using HID