I’m starting week 2 of flowering on my indoor photos. I noticed huge fan leaves blocking quite a few flowers from the light. Can they be removed?
Absolutely. If a leaf is blocking light from a bud site remove it. That doesn’t mean remove them all. Just the one or two required. This defoliation may have to be repeated a few times during the life cycle of the plant.
Another option is to bend the plant so light can get to bud sites using low stress training techniques that could delay removing fan leaves.
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Great thanks. Is there a best time to defoliate during lights? Or does it matter?
Defoliate and train first thing at lights on and monitor results. This gives the plant all ‘day’ to deal with the stress.
Not sure if there is any difference in time, plants experience stress 24/7 outdoors. Training plants indoors creates the same response.
I prune my plants regularly if they are in flower, usually just plucking leaves I feel have served their purpose. This keeps the plants always working strengthening themselves. Along with other training.
You can look at my grow journal here if you want to see them over the past month.
But my plants in Veg are defoliated as they reach their 5th node, from there I regularly prune to keep new sites open to light, focusing on the leaves that are covering other nodes. Once my girls started to really fill out I decrease my pruning, now I am only removing the largest leaves that I can’t move out of the way with bending or LST.
I will be doing a defoliation, LST, and HST training on these girls Sunday.
So this can give you a reference what they look like now, I will tag you after on Sunday you can see roughly how much I take off and how I am opening them up.
I am using a different method this time, unless I really need to none of these will be topped or F’imed.
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Thanks for the help