Pruning at the early stages

Hello all, thank you for being here to help and assist and generally love the same plant as I do. I am, obviously, new to this place so excuse my newb self as I learn the decorum for this forum ;-}

Anyways, I am new to growing indoors as well and have 4 babies at 3 weeks and 4 at 2 weeks. I will lay it out simply as I have to keep it simple for my first couple grows before I use my 15 precious Kush strain seeds.
I am growing under CFL's and LED's - coming from above, below, and the sides - have good air circulation - temps around 24 deg Celius with 55% humidity), a custom made soil medium (good base soil with kelp,alfalfa,sea bird feather meal, worm-castings, coco, sphagnum peat, perlite, vermiculite, rockdust, bone-meal, blood-meal, small clean pepples, other goodies) ... all that and the lil ones are doing good, except I have a question with pruning.
I don't know the strain these seeds came from - I do know it was some very dank green that happened to have 3 seeds in the ounce bag I got - lucky me they all sprouted and have been doing great.
I think there must be some indica because they are becoming bushier than most I have seen at this age with large leaves at only 4inches tall.

So, my question: will it be ok if I went ahead and trimmed the oldest and largest of the leaves (the original from the node) from the top 3 nodes in order to give all the bushy undergrowth fresh light?

Also, I topped 2 and the third I did the FIM thing. Fourth was left alone.

Should they be given extra nutes, or a particular type of nute after a trimming like that at 3 weeks age?

Also, the leaves are not as straight out flat and parallel-ish to the ground the past 4 days or so (prior to the trimming) ... almost like they wanted water, but the soil felt sightly damp and when I added enough to let about 10% run-off the leaves still hadn't "stood straight" after some time.

Any advice, suggestions would be totally welcome and appreciated.

Regards...

As long as you keep the plant healthy, you can pretty much prune it to your hearts content in veg. Just give it a few days to recover before throwing it into bloom. While in bloom, do a daily check to make sure it's not growing anything you don't want it to, and if it is, pinch it off before it has a chance to get too big.

So far so good I guess, and thanks for the quick reply! I had a seedling that started completely deformed... I just let him/her (no idea, just learning and loving it) do what it would. I pinched a leaf here or there that was just too decrapitated to be helping and a week later the little guy is looking like his siblings. They seem to be more resilient than what I have read - given what they need and attention they are little troopers ... hoping to be big, plumb, and dense troopers some day

I doubt at 3 weeks you would need to prune anything and IMO your just stressing it for no reason. Those leaves your removing are the engine and you just remove the horsepower. Just let them be, topping for canopy size is ok but leave the leaf alone, again IMO, perhaps when they are bigger you can remove some of the lower but keep upper ones intacked. Get some experience first then start doing bonsai shit lol.

me myself I go for fimming most times,it is not as brutal as topping them but gives about 2 weeks with limited vertical growth,really about the same as topping,I do this to make sure all my bottom limbs get as tall as the main chute,I like my plant to grow slow vertically and fill out as much as it can ,I have a small space I work with so gets me more bang for my buck ,with fimming and super cropping,I can get 25 to 30 kola's,I make my crown of thorns so to speak,,I try to leave as many leafs as I can,as the plants eat light and they are the solar panels so to speak,,if your are 3 weeks you can do as you like,I have done some super cropping and LST many times to keep them fitting in my space,so have some fun with it,genral rule or is for me I try to keep all my plants close to same height ,so when they get bigger and go to flower,all will get the same lighting roughly,but as i said I work with limited space,here is few pics of a few I have finishing up,not topping all these are fimming and super cropping,,best advice I can give is try to make happy healthy plants and they will do well,and remember what I said Water, feeds and nutrients help as they do absorb them but ,they eat light,photosynthesis is the reproduction of the plants cells and light is what they eat

drewby said:

me myself I go for fimming most times,it is not as brutal as topping them but gives about 2 weeks with limited vertical growth,really about the same as topping,I do this to make sure all my bottom limbs get as tall as the main chute,I like my plant to grow slow vertically and fill out as much as it can ,I have a small space I work with so gets me more bang for my buck ,with fimming and super cropping,I can get 25 to 30 kola's,I make my crown of thorns so to speak,,I try to leave as many leafs as I can,as the plants eat light and they are the solar panels so to speak,,if your are 3 weeks you can do as you like,I have done some super cropping and LST many times to keep them fitting in my space,so have some fun with it,genral rule or is for me I try to keep all my plants close to same height ,so when they get bigger and go to flower,all will get the same lighting roughly,but as i said I work with limited space,here is few pics of a few I have finishing up,not topping all these are fimming and super cropping,,best advice I can give is try to make happy healthy plants and they will do well,and remember what I said Water, feeds and nutrients help as they do absorb them but ,they eat light,photosynthesis is the reproduction of the plants cells and light is what they eat

Click to expand...

Thanks for the replies.
Drewby, really appreciate the info densely packed in your reply. Especially since the two replies before sort of said 2 opposing thoughts -Leaving me bewildered and betrayed... confused, and alone... .
Then you replied, and it was like a shot of a Zoloft/Prozac hybrid .
Seriously though, both replies are valid and have good logic, but basically stated what I've heard/read earlier.
All your suggestions/advice/approach seems very similar to my situation and grow philosophy.
I have a smallish grow area (2x2x4), using florescent (2-4 inches from any baby) and LED lighting (4-8 inches from any baby). I'm striving for at least 8,000-10,000 lumens for each plant overhead with additional side lighting and smaller CFL's and LED's giving light from below and individual small CFL's will be strung throughout the vegetation (between 2 and 4 inches from any leaf), using a custom made organic grow medium (I'm going to post another 'inquiry' about organic soil recipes where I'll post an img of the ingredients I have), decent air circulation, temps and humidity can range from lower 70's to lower 80's deg.F and humidiy ranges from low 40's to mid 50's - is this ok? I also started with alkaline tap water (pH around 8.5) run through a Pur water filter (surprisingly brought pH to a 6.9-7.1) then used a little pH Down (believe it's a sulphur-citric acid mix - not aluminum phosphate). Past week, and moving forward I'll be using rain water.
I topped 2 girls and FIMmed 2... topped 2 are doing well (topped 5 days ago), the other 2 still look healthy and happy but new top growth hasn't begun yet (FIMmed 3 days ago)... is this normal and is there a nutrient or mineral that particularly helps recovery after a topping/fimmimg or general pruning?
Lastly, like you, I prefer slower vert growth while encouraging squat and dense bushy growth. With this in mind, I'd like to add "training with ties" to focus branch and stem growth more horizontally for a couple weeks... have you utilized this technique before, were results good. Any advice toward this goal would be appreciated. Attached are images of my babies (about 4 weeks old) before prunning/topping (week ago) and about 5 days after.
My babies seem very happy and healthy, but then this is my first real grow (not just a bunch of seeds tossed into ground with some cow poo) so maybe they are small for their age or there's something wrong I don' see.
Again, like you, the underlying belief or approach is to grow happy, healthy plants who will someday offer up some tasty appreciation.

Go on then .....carry on stripping your plants of leaves and you'll not be long finding out wich post is CORRECT ..........

You DONT peel leaves from a plant not much older than a seedling......you've topped them so theirs stress str8 away and that 3 week veg ends up more like 2 week veg......