should i cut some leaves off?

hey i noticed my bottom budsites arent really getting much lights because of the huge amount of fan leaves down there, im starting week 4 of flowering now, is it a bad idea to cut some of those off? theyre still all green, but just blocking light

try and tuck the leaves under a branch try and to avoid cutting I use a 1000 watt hps it seems to penatrate quite well

The buds from lower branches will not get very big no matter what you do. Besides being shaded by higher growth, they are further from your light source and the lower branches are genetically predisposed to having smaller buds. My advice would be to cut off all branches and fans leaves from the bottom 1/3 of your plant. It may seem extreme but I have done nearly a year's worth of growing to find out that removing the lower budsites will cause the top ones to get HUGE. The plant will not have to waste any energy on scraggly lower buds. The gain in the top buds far outweighs any piddly little bottom buds you lose. This technique is commonly referred to as lollipopping. Another plus is you can use the cut branches to make clones if you haven't done so already. It is possible to clone at week 4 flower. I have done it myself.

In my humble opinion, and from experience of 9 GROWS, That is a wives tale, and is only ocasionally successful in a SOG grow.
When you cut several branches or leaves off, well,to begin with, those BIG leaves, often called FAN leaves, are the main source of
photosynthesis ,
of taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxyegen for the entire plant. Those big leaves are very needful to the plant's health, and processing food into energy. The wives tales explains it like pigs at a trough eating. Remove some pigs and the other pigs get more. WRONG! It is not the same situation. Beleive me, I own 14 books on GROWING POT and they all agree on this point. Wait until you see one of those bottom leaves YELLOWING naturally, then remove it with sharp scissors. It's best to tuck them to the sides or under each other.
2nd, when you remove several leaves or branches, the opposite happens that you expected, the plant goes into SHOCK and quits eating, drinking and growing.
It is like saying you will have less weight to carry if we cut your legs off. Does that make sense?
And I can also guarantee you, IF you do cut them off, within a week, AFTER it comes out of shock, the little ones will just take the place of the removed leaves, and fill in the space.

So you yourself have grown many clones of the same strain with all other factors the same and had half of them trimmed and half natural? Then you carefully measured and weighed the results to get your "educated" opinion? I don't care what it says in a book. This is something I have done MYSELF. Wives' tale, shmives tale. I'm only trying to save the guy the effort I went to.

It's okay to "lollipop" by cutting off lower growth in the form of small shoots and buds but DO NOT cut off any of the plants fans, most especially the big ones. As the plants mature into flowering these leaves will die off naturally, but never cut of pick them off for the reasons mentioned above.

mared juwan said:

So you yourself have grown many clones of the same strain with all other factors the same and had half of them trimmed and half natural? Then you carefully measured and weighed the results to get your "educated" opinion? I don't care what it says in a book. This is something I have done MYSELF. Wives' tale, shmives tale. I'm only trying to save the guy the effort I went to.

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No, read it again, the word CLONES is not even there.
I have done two grows that I trimmed the lower fan leaves off and it was a major mistake for me.
and I offered him my opinion. I wasn't addressing you.

What does it matter if it's clones? I only said that to demonstrate all the plants in my experiment were genetically identical. You called what I said a wives' tale but you weren't addressing me? Why was trimming the lower fan leaves a big mistake for you? What happened? How can you tell it was a mistake? I've never seen the trimming I describe "stress" a plant and cause it to grow slower. There's your wives tale.

Don't cut the fan leaves off!! They, as mentioned before are your main photosynthesizers (is that a word?) and they store essential nutrients the plant will need to grow decent buds. Cutting the leaves off will result in nothing more than slowed growth, which will cause smaller, lighter buds in the end.

Slowed growth due to missing nutrients, and photosynthesis is straight forward...plants rely on those factors for optimal growth.

alright i wont cut off the fan leaves, i tucked a few away to expose more

but now im interested in lollipopping.

Should i cut all the budsites off the bottom 1/3 of the plant then (not the FANS)? the ones that barely have any hairs compared to the ones higher up?

cut 6 of the bottom budsites off..the ones that only had 2-8 hairs growing, and i did a little more lst which made the middle budsites pop out of the shade a little more

looking sexy, it's too bad i don't know where that cloning solution is..

mared juwan said:

What does it matter if it's clones? I only said that to demonstrate all the plants in my experiment were genetically identical. You called what I said a wives' tale but you weren't addressing me? Why was trimming the lower fan leaves a big mistake for you? What happened? How can you tell it was a mistake? I've never seen the trimming I describe "stress" a plant and cause it to grow slower. There's your wives tale.

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It's all good..I cut off fans leaves as well and I lollipot too. To each his own. There's always more than one way to do most things.

any triming should be done in veg do it now and flower for an extra 2 maybee 3 weeks and i have at least 30-40 grows under my belt

mared juwan said:

What does it matter if it's clones? I only said that to demonstrate all the plants in my experiment were genetically identical. You called what I said a wives' tale but you weren't addressing me? Why was trimming the lower fan leaves a big mistake for you? What happened? How can you tell it was a mistake? I've never seen the trimming I describe "stress" a plant and cause it to grow slower. There's your wives tale.

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only way for an accurate demonstration is with clones all seeds are diffrnt even if ther of the same strain could be a diffrnt phenotype

Rizzo, you won't be sorry. As I said I did multiple side by side grows with lollipopped and untrimmed plants. No LST or topping or any other difference besides the lollipopping because I wanted to investigate this exact issue. Untrimmed plants produced decent buds but after a while I could get lollipopped plants to make colas like this:



I can't do this with a plant that has branches all the way down to the soil. I lollipop all my plants now and they all turn out like this

tusseltussel said:

only way for an accurate demonstration is with clones all seeds are diffrnt even if ther of the same strain could be a diffrnt phenotype

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Right, that's what I'm saying. So are you agreeing with me?

I cut some of the lower leafs of as an experiment and the yeild on that plant was maybe ten to fifteen percent less the others of the same strain :s

iPlatypus said:

I cut some of the lower leafs of as an experiment and the yeild on that plant was maybe ten to fifteen percent less the others of the same strain :s

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You removed just leaves? Lollipopping is removing the bottom branches with budsites. Removing only fan leaves is not a good idea.

mared juwan said:

Right, that's what I'm saying. So are you agreeing with me?

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i am but agree with the clone thing but still would never cut up a plant in flower but i also lst or scrog my plants i trim em all up at least 1 week b4 12\12 i dont lolipop

EDIT:im really stoned srry