Defoliate or not?

The plants are happy and have reaching leaves. There are buds starting to form up and some stretch happening. There are a bit more leaves too. Do i need to defoliate now? Is there any sign for defoliation, or any defoliation schedule guide?

Usually people defoliate like the first day of real flowering so a week or 2 after switching to 12-12 lights then another 21 days that’s when ppl do mid defole then some people even do another defoliation near end of flower

John Ames said:

The plants are happy and have reaching leaves. There are buds starting to form up and some stretch happening. There are a bit more leaves too. Do i need to defoliate now? Is there any sign for defoliation, or any defoliation schedule guide?

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Clean up everything under the SCROG. Don’t worry about what’s above it.

I clear under the canopy and remove the odd leaf from the canopy but very selective generally i don't agree with it.

But...It's not escaped my attention that some plants are leafy af and don't produce better/bigger buds than sparsely populated plants.

I'm asking myself if they really need all of them?

My last crop i removed leafs 8-9 weeks into flower and fk me what a difference it made to humidity.

I need to experiment more with it, worst case scenario lower humidity, or maybe better buds and lower humidity, that would be something.

I just like to keep some space underneath the plant and I do defoliate throught the grow. Just specific parts that I might feel the plant will benefit from. This one has gone through 3 and I was just thinking it's time to do another cleanup at week 7 of flower on this one.



As you can tell it isn't super clean underneath, so I snagged some of what I didn't like in this picture. Tomorow I'll trim both plants, weeks 6 and 8 flower in a couple of days. This was just for the pic. Noneed for that stuff this late in flower.