Large leaves near top of plant

I keep running into this problem. As my plants grow, there are very large fan leaves near the top of the plant which shade out almost all of the secondary limbs off the main stem. I’ve done a scrogging with some success but wonder if I trimmed off some of those top leaves giving light to those shoots below would be ok. There are still plenty of big fan leaves below. Thoughts? I’d prefer not to go through scrogging again and since the shoots are nowhere near as tell as the main ones it would still leave them with too much shade.

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Can you tuck them out of the way.
I can usually find a way to do that.

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I’ve tried that a bit but there are so many

I always leave the two top fan leaves on each kola during flower, the others I remove as flower progresses. If it casts a shadow on the budsites that’s ok, buds don’t need the light like fan leaves do to create photosynthesis, think of the buds as the fruit is to a fruit tree.
Fan leaves do use energy, the same energy that the plant uses to grow, it becomes a catch 22 scenario. To many fan leaves removed and you will slow down your growth and possibly stunt her, to many fan leaves left on, high humidity, chance of pm, bud rot, shade, etc. so there is a fine line with removing fan leaves (defoliation) you can always remove them but you can’t put them back on. Here is an example at week 4 of flower.

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Pictures would be helpful. :slightly_smiling_face:

I have run into the same problem. @Skyblue I have tied some of the big fan leafs at the top down with nylon. And also took a few. I feel like taking a couple Worked out just fine for me. Plant Within a week full again. I was working with gold leaf which has some big elephant ear fan leafs.

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Pardon the coloring as these were taken under the grow light

Those are definitely some big fan leaves. It looks like the plant may only be several weeks old?

It’s going to be hard to tuck those and expect that they will stay for very long. You could chop a couple off, but I wouldn’t take very many. When chopping fan leaves it is best to take off the older ones. Newer vegetation is more efficient at producing food for the plant anyway, but that isn’t going to help you get light down the center of the plant.

I top my girls and them train what remains to grow out rather than up. Here is a picture of a 5 week old plant that was topped 12 days ago. I’ve pinned the stems protruding out from below where I’ve topped (3rd node) down as much as I could without damaging (splitting) the node. I’ve done the same with the 2 new mains that have grown out from the topping.

If you do this, then you have to be real careful not to put very much pressure on the nodes that you are pinning down or they will split. This is particularly true if you have used supplements such as silica or seed sprout tea, which act to stiffen the plant’s structure.

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This is helpful. Yeah, they’re about 4 weeks old. I was going to give them one more week before turning to flowering mode. I’ll take a few of the bigger leaves off and pin the rest. Thanks!

Don’t take off too many. Your plant only has a few nodes up at 4 weeks and needs most of them to take care of the plant’s business.

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Beautiful looking plants! Sativa? I wish my leaves would behave like yours. Mine are bigger than my hand at only 4 weeks from sprout

She is Cherry Pie a hybrid from ILGM. Your plant is just a youngin, and just like young kids they don’t behave all the time :rofl:

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