Looks good to me, CornNugget. You'll develop an eye for it-- knowing what to look for, plus you'll figure out "your" personal system to doing it. The basic idea is for air-flow, minimizing areas bugs like to hide in. The low & inner areas often produce branches & buds that are thin, small & "larfy", and the theory is that the plant will use life-force energy to keep these small, goofy nuggets alive when they're never even really going to grow much at all... So then by trimming those branches (& buds) away, we're (in theory) diverting that life-force energy towards the larger, more significant branches & buds.
An example of developing your own system of defoliating: This year I defoliated all of those "first", 3-fingered leaves, plus I snipped-off all the tiny, weak, or retarded little leaf-clusters, probably the most-stunted 5 or 7% from the whole plant. Of course, I did this early in my outdoor grow cycle, a few times throughout the vegetative-growth stage, right up to flowering (just earlier this week). It's important to note that the plant is NOW (mid-August) beginning to divert it's hormones & cycles towards bud-development and not as much into repair, recovery, & leaf-sprouting, so you can use a "heavy hand"
in the veg-cycle, but we've gotta be careful
not to de-leaf
too much as we begin flowering. Healthy green leaves are loaded with the plant's sugars... That's where it stores it's energy-- in those leaves... I find myself creating a balance in the dichotomy of pruning:
The plant is resilient and, in it's veg-phase, will keep producing new stems, stalks, nodes & leaf-clusters, so we can (and kinda should) be as heavy with cutting & pruning as is sensible. The plant will recover & regrow practically un-phased... But then, on the other hand, the leaves ARE the sugar. The leaves ARE the things that absorb the Sunlight. So I also believe that too many people are too heavy-handed at de-foliating perfectly good leaves that the plant could use for energy in making bigger, sweeter buds, and that we should maybe keep those on the plant until she's finished with them, & the deep & vibrant green has faded from them.
Jorges Cerventes is an ol' school grower whom I admire. Just watch this short video-clip & listen to the thought-bombs he drops on defoliating:
So the end result is a plant with a totally cleaned-out lower half, looking practically skeletal. The hardest part is getting out of my own way, because sometimes I want to
think that I'm trimming too much, but I intuit or
feel my way through it.
I have a personal twitch regarding bugs and mold, and they both love those tightly packed, dense areas of foliar growth. And I noticed that this kind of growth occurs more thickly
at the inner parts of the offshoot-branches,
close to the vertical stalks. So when a vertical stalk has an offshoot branch that has 3 nodes or more growing from it, I'd trim off the innermost nodes, closest to the vertical stalk. This is an example of "my own" little system that I figured-out. Create "rules", so to speak, as you learn & figure things out. It helps to understand your goal. For me, it's always bug-prevention & mold-prevention. So it's keeping as much potential bud-to-be as I can, while also clearing-out as much as I can to make space. Remember: What growth remains will stretch, sprout, & blossom even more than it would've
if you had not cut.
What you've done here looks really good!
