I defoliated my plants week 3 flowering good or bad??

M

MjAeJdIiK

Well-Known Member
Lots and lots of debate on this topic. If you do defoliate, take a little at a time, open up some sites by removing fan leaves, then leave it be for a few days, repeat. Imo defoliation can help in some cases but you shouldn't take it all at once
 
BobCajun

BobCajun

Well-Known Member
Ford Racing said:
I defoliated my plants 3 weeks into flowering. This was an extreme defo have I screwed up?
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It'll just slow them down. Since florigen comes from the leaves it's probably best to keep as many on as possible during flowering. It's okay in veg stage, because all that will happen is that growth will be set back a week or so but they will catch up. In flowering stage, it could have worse effects. I try to keep leaf trimming to a minimum during flowering. Maybe near the end of flowering when the buds are mostly formed already and you want to let more light reach lower buds to make them more solid. That seems to turn out okay, like the final week. When you do a lot of leaf trimming in early flower what happens is that the lower leaves on the buds just get quite large to make up for the main leaves that were removed, but growth will be slowed until they make up for the lost leaf area.
 
M

MjAeJdIiK

Well-Known Member
Gregor Eisenhorn said:
Actually, there is a defoiliation technique that encourages heavy de-leafing at days 25 and 45 of flower. The grower actually noticed an explosive increase in bud development, but I'm not saying it's a good method as I have never tried it out.

So don't listen to what the others are saying... yet. We'll see in a few days.

Here's the link: http://www.growweedeasy.com/defoliation
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I had a small light and small space for this grow, my plants were all shaded except for the tops, very little bud development on anything not rightvat the top of the canopy, so I did some light defoliation to open the canopy up and expose to more light... Well 3 days after I did it the flowers quadrupled in size and all the shit that's was super whispy and getting no light started to plump right up, and continued to develop nicely, way better than before I defoliated. Just like that guy who's thread you linked
 
Gregor Eisenhorn

Gregor Eisenhorn

Well-Known Member
I'm in before page 300, but you're right, you have to find that sweet spot.

I swear if I ever get myself a new space to grow (like a tent) I'll grow a mother and then use the clones I take from her to do a side by side comparison. One plant with heavy defoiliating, the second with mild, only on a need to do bases and the third one I won;t touch.

Then we'll see what happens.
 
rendar1970

rendar1970

Member
I had a plant this run (about 2 more weeks to go) that I decided to try some extreme defoliation. I got interested in the idea from a guide at http://www.growweedeasy.com/defoliation . This guy suggests the removal of EVERY SINGLE FAN LEAF after the first 2 weeks of stretch in flower. So I gave it a shot. Not impressed. I have 6 InnerChi (Larry OG x OG Kush) under a 600w HPS. I also tried mainlining for my LST this time around. Which I also most likely wont be trying again. While the structure of Mainlining did work, and I have roughly 6 nice big main branches, they stretched a ton, leaving lots of space between bud sites so even on my nicer non defoliated plants, the buds didnt stack as nicely as I wanted.

Pros:
  • Very uniform bud growth. The buds at the bottom of the plant that are usually just trash or popcorn, are nearly as big as the top buds.
  • Before the defoilation (and partly why I chose to do it) this plant started to get a few tiny spots of Powdery Mildew, this pretty much stopped that in its tracks
  • My humidity became much more stable and easier to control
Cons:
  • While most buds are the same size, even the biggest of buds are much smaller than the same plant that had almost no defoliation.
  • The plant that was defoliated also didnt fill in or stack buds nearly as nice as the others.
  • Plant was obviously stunted. Shorter than the others, never really filled out, buds never swelled up like the others, the whole thing just turned into a runt.

Overall, was worth the experiment. Sure this is just my experience with a single plant, on a single run. But it was enough of a side by side for me to sway me heavily away from defoliation. I think its still worth it to remove a few of the bigger fan leaves in the middle of the plant to increase airflow, prevent PM, and get some light to lower growth, but no where near suggested in that guide and on some places on forums.

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