Who removes fan leaves?

I've done a lot of work on defoliation:


10/5


Two weeks later 10/19



There is a time and a place for defoliation. Like all training methods, from topping to super cropping, some additional time must be compensated for to allow the plant to rebound and for the training to be utilized. Each defoliation takes about 4 days to rebound from, then in the following 4 days a superior amount of growth will allow the plant to catch up to where it should be. After about a week the plant is stronger with more bud sites, and an even denser canopy. This fuels better growth but requires extra time.

So comparatively, there really is no net gain, or net loss. It isn't some great evil. It also isn't some fantastic game changer. It is what it is, and like all methods, it depends on the grower and the garden.

I personally don't trim any leaves during veg. in the first week or so of flower after pistils have began forming I find (with this current strain, raspberry cough) that the lower third has almost zero pistil formation until after the main colas have already begun forming buds. So what I do is trim off all the growth on the lower third of the plant fan leaves and all. compared to grows where I have not done this the yield tends to be the same with the difference being that the top buds are denser and I have less popcorn buds as a whole. NOW I would find it stupid to cut off ALL the fan leaves for the same reason that almost every person on this forum has said.

When I first started growing I would remove leaves if the point or tip of the leaf pointed inward twards the the stem, but would not remove any outward pointing/facing leaves for light penetration. Over the years I have modified this method. Now, insted of removing leaves for the purpose of light reaching the lower buds, I remove those buds and leave the leaves. If I ever remove a large inward facing leaf, I do so only for the benefit of light penetrating the canopy to reach more leaves. Leaves are to a plant what organs are to you, if they're removed, you may continue to live, but your quallity of life will suffer.

i don't trim any leaves until about week 3 in flower then i use my thumb nail and index finger and snap off a few in the middle just to open things up.. i just take off some of the inner fan leaves tho, i always leave them all on at least 6 nodes from the tops... but who knows, maybe i'm supposed to take them all off, or leave them all on. lol.. isn't that what we're tryin to figure out? ya.. to leave most all of them on makes the most sense to me..

well that sucks... im a neb... and i trimmed all of my fan leaves.... after reading this i wish i would have not done it tho.... plants are doing good tho... they just keep on pushing new growth after i removed ALL of the fan leaves...

Indoors during summer have always been torturous for my plants. I remove bottom leaves for the improved air circulation underneath canopy. Sure my yields do suffer compared to leaves not removed but they continue to grow unlike my first few summers of not removing those leaves. During winters and spring indoors, they are left alone.

i remove the lower small branches for airflow after a few weeks in or even budding.
As for the fan leaves, i dont have pics but i have tried it side by side..a few plants i plucked the mojority of the fan leaves and left the rest intact so see if they would truly help the lower buds develop better. The ones with the most fan leaves missing really didnt produce as much as the ones left with all thier leaves but the lower nugs were a lil more denser and bigger. i guess to a limit its ok so more light penetrates the lower parts of the plant. dont get trigger happy with those scissors lol

lol i tried that on one of my plants but it took a lot longer to grow after all the other ones finished...but the nugs all over the plant were a decent size

Yep removing fan leaves unless growth will suffer is wrong, my mate did a grow and yielded mega loads, next grow he belived the hype and removed a lot of fan leaves in flowering and was crying when his harvest turned out real small and crap. Plants use the leaves to make more leaves. Only mother nature should decide when a leaf is no longer needed!

Kingrow1 said:

Yep removing fan leaves unless growth will suffer is wrong, my mate did a grow and yielded mega loads, next grow he belived the hype and removed a lot of fan leaves in flowering and was crying when his harvest turned out real small and crap. Plants use the leaves to make more leaves. Only mother nature should decide when a leaf is no longer needed!

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That's only because he did it wrong.

You want to condition the plant during vegetative growth. I would defoliate my plants every 4 days, leaving just the top few leaf sets on each node as well as all the lower nodes. These lower nodes responded enforce and replaced the lost leaf mass in just a few short days.

It is a repetition of defoliate, then internodes fill in, then defoliate, then the internodes of the internodes fill in, then defoliate. And as it goes you get more and more healthy branches which can support big buds. Very similar to superior methods like Scrog and LST.

After the 10th day or so from the 12/12 transition you have to stop tearing off leaves because the plant has shifted focus to the flower sites. By this point you should have a dense and thick canopy with dozens of budsites each supporting dozens of leaves. The time was spent for this purpose.

There are some growers that believe stripping the plant of its major fan leaves (the big ones with stems more than 1 inch long) around 10 days before harvest forces the plants into a stress-reaction "overdrive" which makes the plant push all its remaining resources into ripening up as big as possible to maintain the genetics. In the wild it'd be like a plant responding to a swarm of locusts or caterpillars. The sudden loss of leaf mass supposedly translates into vigorous flower ripening.

I haven't toyed around with this concept myself... yet... but if someone had an "extra" plant in the garden they would be willing to try it on that'd be great. Problem is most everyone here are new growers, or in small closets. The guys with the big setups are all commercial. The actual experimental crowd is surprisingly small and most people who speak out against techniques have never actually used them in their own garden. I think at some point you just got to try it out for yourself and see what happens. Do it smart though...

Stripping the leaves off a plant 4 weeks into flowering is daringly stupid.

Snow crash i totally agree with you its just my mate heard that if you do it in full flower nearish the end of the grow it would increase yield, his buds never got any bigger or filled out after he done that. Yes i totally agree with your way of defoliating and is a valid lst method or somthing like that. As you say though the plant needs recovery time but new growth is better. I like the way you described it and very good pics. I think the guy heard that myth of stripping near the end of flowering but waas disatorous for him, would love to see someone try it though and then maybe we could make it a valid technique if it worked. I use to defoliate the odd leaf to increase light levels to lower buds but found it wasn't woth it, now i bend a few leaves out the way rather than strip them to increase light to lower levels. Defoliating is not for me though as my grow is not suited for it, i use cfls and flourescent striplights in small spaces so just top and little lst but if i had more space and time i would use your method as i can totally see its benifits and how it works. I can see the principal behind stripping fan leaves at the end of flowering but would like to see someone do it first as well as read up on the biology of doing this, see how energy transfers and transpiration is affected, i am quite scientific but this is the finer points of plant biology and physiology. I will endeavour to reasearch this futher if i can.

i've completely removed all the fan leaves on a blue skunk plant i had that was infested with spidermites, never could get rid of them, i think they were actually coming from the inside of the plant.. but anyway, ya i actually stripped her of all the leaves 3 times 1 during veg, and 2 during flower. and sprayed her down with neem and azamax... but ya, she grew to be a huge beast.. she was 7' tall and 5' wide and had over a pound of dry buds.. they were ok, either not the greatest strain or some shitty genetics.. but the buds themselves were nice.. so in other words, she came out fine, but had she not been infested and i took off all the leaves 3 times, she may have produced more?

but then, had i not taken off all the leaves 3 times she may not have had to fight and grew so strong? hmmm? idk

I do extreme low stress training and I tuck before I pluck. But if there's a fan that I can't find a good place to tuck and it's blocking new growth I'll snip it. The important part when you snip a fan leaf is that a shoot has already emerged from the node and that the shoot established itself with it's own couple nodes. This is only an opinion, but once that shoot has established itself, the fan/sucker leaf has done it's job. If it's hampering light exposure and/or airflow it can go. I've heard all the solar panel stuff and maybe it's true, but I pluck and think that the plant benefits greatly from it. I was a non plucker back in the day and I've seen nothing but benefits from pruning.

Veg is about getting lots of good solid sites to grow bud not growing a shade tree with monster leaves all over it.

on my last post i meant i plucked off 80% of the leaves...wish i took pics tho

what i also noticed is that the leaves grew back incredibly fast i travel a lot so after 3-4 days being gone from the garden its like i came back to a new crop. i dont kow if this is the same with everyone tho

Brick Top said:

Who removes fan leaves?


The answer to that is, people who have growing beliefs but totally lack any true botanical knowledge.

The question has been answered near countless times, but those who cling to myth and misperception and half truths and old hippie folklore refuse to accept the truth So too many the question appears to remain unanswered.

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Thumbs up. My opinion is leave them be. if you have lighting issues? Buy a lamp cord and a hanging regular light ballast, find a CFL bulb of the right spectrum and hang it in between your plants - Cutting leaves off only promotes new fan leaves to grow - Growing new fan leaves takes more energy and causes more stress for the plant. Dont be cheap, just add more sufficient undergrowth lighting. To show you what I am talking about talk to Gastanker, have him show you his X RAY grow... Fuckin genius.

i have a room with 8 skunk #1 plants. i run 1 1000w HPS per plant for the whole life cycle. i grow in coco with 10% perlite in 95 litre pots and run too waste. i have 4 * 44gallon drums as my brain. i use canna veg nutes @ 125% recommended doses as i know they understate dosages. i also use cannazyme and rhizotonic and microbial.
this time i thought id experiment with 2 plants. during veg stage (18/6) i pruned back the 2 hard. removed all shade leves that were bigger and 1 1/2 inch dia every 2nd week. i tie my plants to get maximum horizontal coverage and when i turned them to flower at week 8 they were 12 inches high and approx 4 ft dia.
i changed my nutes to house and garden flores @ 100% doses and kept with the canna veg nutes for the first 2 weeks @ 25% doses. as well as adding rock resinator into the mix. and from week 4 of flower til the end used bud xl at 100% dose.
i didnt prune the 2 plants for the first 2 week of flower after that i kept tying them and would trim off any excessive leaf coverage that was restricting light from being allowed down to the bottom growth. at week 4-5 of flowering i removed all lower branches that had little to no flowers forming on them for 2 reasons 1) they were using nutes and taking up energy that was producing nothing and 2) air flow.
flowering took 12 weeks and from the 6 plants that i let grow 'naturally' i averaged 4 1/2 lbs per plant and the 2 that i 'man handled' i averaged 4 lbs per plant.
this is just what i did for my last crop and will let you draw your own conclusions from this.
as for me personally i prob will remove excess leaves in the future but ot to the extent that i did on the 2 plants from the last crop but...... if you dont try you dont learn.
i also keep a diary of when i fill the water tank, how much nutes i add, weekly growth measurements etc just so i can go back over them and see if something works a little better than other things. i have also become friends with the guys that run the hydro shop they both have over 20 years of growing experience each and have given me alot of very helpful advice over the past 5-6 years that has helped me immensely. its all about trial and error

I've had plants with few fan leaves in flowering grow massive colas but the colas had lots and lots of the smaller type of bud leaves so lots of leaf surface area, a grow jounal of this might be helpful!