Hey Boomer.
I've always believed that if the plant is taking all that time to GROW those leaves, then it needs them to make big fat juicy buds! I think of them has little sugar factories. All that time and effort and nutrients into filling those big lucious dark green leaves with insane amounts of delicious sugars.
Now, flip the timers, and you're into the FLOWER stage. The flowering stage is where the plant is "dieing"...really. Now, its going to develop little bud sites and once those are set in place, the plant is going to start using all those sugars that it took sooo much time (veg) to make, and put them into those juicy tasty buds that you do indeed want.
So why spend all that time forcing sugars and carbs into the leaves, if you're just going to remove them. As you can tell, when a plant starts to run out of nitrogen, the leaves (OLDEST BIGGEST LEAVES FIRST) begin to turn from green, to a very pale yellow.. Now break off one of those yellowing leaves, and juices will be running out of the stem like a tear drop, and they will most defiently have a flavorful scent to them.
I am a huge believer in leaving the leaves on the plant. In my opinion, you want to maintain a proper level of nitrogen throughout the flower phase, so you
dont have to feed Nitrogen to late, as it causes harsh, grassy, hay tasting smoke.
The objective, in my opinion, is to maintain the proper level of Nitrogen in the leaves so that when it comes time to flush, by the end of the flush all of your leaves are PALE yellow. They will die off by themself, if un-needed.
The ONLY reason I trimmed off the fan leaves that I did was for two reasons.
The first reason was because of spider mites. I noticed they loved the lower leaves and seemed to web up right where the leaf/stem meets up. Removing these made it easy for me to control my spider-mite issue.
The second reason was because of the dead leaves. They looked ugly, so I got rid of them..ADD kickin in.
Throughout this grow, I noticed that a lot of the buds that I peeled back and clipped the fan leaves that were deep in the buds, filled up those gabs and left me with some excellent nuggage.
I think the best option, after going both routes, (not de-leafing ANYTHING vs delafing EVERYTHING) led me to come to some good conclusions. I think if one were to want to deleaf, they should wait until the finishing weeks of flower. I think robbing a plant of its energy/juice is a horribly mean thing to do and I think you will be punished greatly for it.
Everything mentioned above was pure opinion and theory that I came across after my own personal experiments...none of it should be considered fact.
Another thing to note is, best case scenario, you flush everything and everything turns pale yellow, purple/pink leaves (zinc def.) and you should have some super high quality tasting smoke.
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tonight my ADD kicked in when I got home. i've been wanting to take a plant down and have been talking about it to my best buddy all day. I dont know why i am getting so impatient but it's really starting to kick in, so I took down my most ready looking lady.
Can anyone guess the weight?? -- I'll weigh this one separately.
The last picture was the plant that I took down. The picture was taken 12/05, 9 days ago... The pale yellow leaves are a sign of a proper flush, which eventually turned pink/purple on the bottom sides.