Scrog pruning/training advice - week 3 flowering

Hey everyone. Just an update and a quick question. I flipped to flower 19 days ago and things are progressing nicely from what I can tell. This is my first grow and I’ve got two critical mass plants in a 4x4 so I’m just basing everything I see from the resources I can find online.

I cleared out all of the undergrowth last week and it’s pretty clean under the screen. However I notice a lot of little popcorn buds on the stems that lay horizontal to the screen. should I leave these alone or prune them? I figure there’s 5-6 weeks left to go, when’s the latest I should do any trimming?

It will be three weeks this Thursday since flipping, do things look good for this stage? I’m assuming the buds will get bigger towards week 5? I think I’ve done my last tuck/training today, the stems are starting to get stiff and harder to move. Any advice is appreciated.

Canopy:

Underneath:

One of colas:

Some examples of the popcorn buds along the stems:

I'm still figuring scrog out myself, but I'd say if your less then 1/3 of your flower period them cautiously prune...maybe a few per day over a few days. If your more then 1/3 of the flower period then snip one off occasionally or you may piss it off/stress it...like I did to mine the other day, turned 50% of the nice white hairs to orange over night...week 6 of 9...lol

In my SCROG grows, I find that those little branches eventually become buried in the canopy by the larger tops as they beef up. They usually don't produce anything worthwhile and from the pic of your entire canopy, I can see those little suckers becoming buried.

You can remove those little popcorn bud branches entirely. Follow them back to the main stem and snip them off. I bet the underneath will be cleaned up a bit more.

The popcorn buds are newer buds right at nodes on branches that are stretched and running horizontally along the screen. So there’s no branches to follow. All branches end above the canopy, these buds are just popping up further down the branch but still at the screen level. Most are only 1-2 nodes down from the main cola.

Critical Canuck said:

The popcorn buds are newer buds right at nodes on branches that are stretched and running horizontally along the screen. So there’s no branches to follow. All branches end above the canopy, these buds are just popping up further down the branch but still at the screen level. Most are only 1-2 nodes down from the main cola.

Click to expand...

defoliate the lowers...just my .02.
It will amount to nothing but larf that will be used for water hash or edibles.