Increasing yield with defoliation indoors: What's it mean? How to do it?

Great post Bassman!
It answered so many questions I had.
On my last grow I actually did a pretty heavy defol due to PM.
When my grow buddy came over, he was like "Damn! why'd you take so many fans off!!? you should have left more bro. those fans are like lungs!" he said.
I argued that they had PM anyway, and were shading all of my bud sites which were now getting light, and it DID make the buds really swell.
Although I had my hps mounted vertically there wasn't really a "canopy" per say, but there was even light distribution all the way around.
I'm now day 28 into flower with my current grow. Stretch has stopped, I've done some defoliation and spread everything out by tying to stakes and the tomato cages. Some colas on the edges, are poking up higher than their sisters, would they be candidates for bending or supercropping? or is it too late for that?
I looked and didn't see any mention of it, are you using CO2??
 
no co2. I don't believe it would be worth it with such a small grow of only 4 plants. I could be wrong though.

I'd need to see pics on your question to answer with a reasonable opinion.

Sounds like you're doing fine now.
 
hi mate, dont worry about that plant i was asking you about, i just removed 1 set of fan leaves, not the top set but the set below and this opened it all up and got the light into every part of the plant, so my problem is solved, i also removed a load of fan leaves from one of my plants that now stopped stretching so ill see how that goes, i took a lot off and hoping it will give me some good results, if not then ill try again but start the defo method earlier on during veg, but by just taking the leaves off the buds look a whole lot better, all getting light instead of just the tops of the buds, i didnt realise how much was actually in the shade, but as soon as i started removing leaves it rally opened the buds up, so all been well this should increase bud size and production.
 
wow! hell of a yield with no CO2.
here's a few photos from last week.
Wondering if I should do a heavy defol today (day 28 flower) and if I should bend the outer buds to even out the canopy.
3rdwk_day23_9.jpg
3rdwk_day23_8.jpg
3rdwk_day23_6.jpg
 
Vick, I definitely would. fans with 1" or more stem and not attached to a newly formed node with no real leaf development yet, I would pull. If it doesnt have a stem it stays. I see lots that are shading out your grow there. Looks nice and healthy too.
 
Bassman59 said:
Vick, I definitely would. fans with 1" or more stem and not attached to a newly formed node with no real leaf development yet, I would pull. If it doesnt have a stem it stays. I see lots that are shading out your grow there. Looks nice and healthy too.
Click to expand...

Cool, thanks Bassman!
but what about a bit of bending of taller colas?
 
those ones that are 6" above the canopy yes. Otherwise no.
 
Fantastic write up bassman! i wish this had been up a few months ago, i sort of self discovered defoliation. as nieve as it sounds i didnt think too many people did it and i was pioneering, lol. but then i was still very much into the reading every scrap of knowledge phase and most of what i read was about not defoliating, i felt certain tho that plants have their leaves eaten all the time and have automatic responses.

i wanted to bring up a few points, some are statements for your consideration and others are questions. and some im already forgetting as i type =/ lol (its stupid oclock in the morning)

you havnt mentioned water or nutes. do you not find ( i suppose its hard to notice in hydro) that fully defoliated plants drink a LOT less water and need less nutrients, especially nitrogen?

have you given up on defoliating in waves? i pluck every couple of days, as soon as the second set of leaves is formed i will pluck the first.

i dont wait any length of time till i defoliate, if i can fit the scissors between the leaf and the plant...snip, but i always leave the grow tips alone.

would you consider trying horizontal lighting instead of vertical, just seems to me that side lighting would get much better penetration with no leaves, especially with multiple light sources.

i reccomend those mylar (an american word i think) foil survival blankets for floor and container top reflectives, hell i built my entire grow room out of them, lol.

several not so natural disasters have befallen my regular plants or they would have probably been harvested already (repotted into soil that was too hot, dog made me drop one down the stairs, nights were way too cold, e.t.c) so instead they became clone factories. im running some sweet fast bud no2's atm and running full defoliation, but to be honest its my first grow of them and im not using very strong lights at all, and they all grow uneven sizes (unstable pheno?) so i havnt really been able to document in such a fantastic fashion as you have.

i do highly reccomend much more agression with the defoliation tho in your next trial. treat those little suckers like the enemy and if you can get between the leaf and the stem its spawning from..kill it! =)

one thing i would like to try in the future. bending the plants below the lowest flower site and just growing them sidewards, using something like your pipe grid to keep them down. in theory you should only need to bend once in the life of the plant and im sure thats gotta have some benefit in reduced stress.
 
Thanks for chiming in Gig!

Hopefully as my eyes are barely open and I get ready for work I can respond in some sort of cognitive fashion.

Yes, I would say they use less water, but tbh, I couldn't tell you how much. Lets face it, there are just so much fewer leaves after a major stripping they can't transpire a lot of water. How many times have we reached in through a super bushy plant and gotten wet or seen water droplets hit the floor or all over the leaves?

On plucking in waves. In veg I do pluck in waves. I make 2-3 large strippings, in veg. I don't take the leaves off the tops of branches. And if a new node is forming and doesnt have any real leaf growth yet then I wont take that corresponding fan leaf until it's a more formed node. In flower phase, I wait until stretch is over, then hit em hard. Basically at 21 days or so. But again, I don't take leaves attached to a newly forming node/bud until it's fully developed with some of it's own leaf. Beyond that, then yes I basically take leaves with at least a 1" stem. After the 21 day strip I tend to pluck some nearly daily as the fan leaves get large enough to have some real stem. You begin to get a feel for it too. Plucking strong vibrant fan leaves rather than those that are developing and are somewhat more elastic or stringy. When a stem has a slight pop feel to it when I clip it between thumbnail and finger, I know it was a good one to take.

Some folks will take them in two large batches in flower. At day 21 and at day 45. I feel that either way is fine and personal choice.

I can totally dig vertical lighting, but for me and my small 5'x5' tent grow this wouldnt be a wise choice for 3-4 plants as the light, even a single vertical hung bulb would take up too much space in the lateral growth area. My last grow totally filled my 5x5 and I expect this one too as well. I'm actually considering lowering my plant count to three in the 5x5 area. Yet I do believe, that for the grower with the room, ability to control heat, vertical multi bulb penetration could really make this stand out even more. Just have some good sunglasses and sunblock when you go in there!

Bending plays a key part, but we are spreading this plant out laterally to cover a wide footprint and be within the best delivery area of the light top to bottom. So we are taking full advantage of height AND width from the light. I can see holding them down to a max height, and do so myself, but that's so the bottom would be popcorn gets good light as opposed to too tall and weak light. In fact, I'm finding that I need a much bigger reflector also for better full area coverage. I may in fact pull the 1k hps, replace with a 400w hps, and ADD my 685w led to the tent for more total area coverage in my current grow until I buy I bigger reflector.

Again, the main theory behind all of this is just an alternative way to get maximum light to the most buds possible.
 
Here is a really interesting point I found from a grower that on his first four trials saw a 4oz avg increase with yields of 12-15oz per plant. I really like his thoughts here. Follow it closely.

In nature, plants undergo leaf senescence as part of their strategy to survive. Senescence can be described
in plants as a change process as much as a dying process.
At some point in flower, I believe it is at the end of stretch, when maximum root and shoot mass have been
achieved, I think the fan leaves radically slow down photosynthetic production, starting with the bottom
leaves first.
Outdoors, uncultivated plants, which usually have had to make a meager living from whatever nutrients
occur naturally in the soil, begin consuming the nutrients stored in their leaves for flower production. This is
mostly true of indicas as they usually have a much shorter season than sativas and grow in areas with
pronounced wet/dry cycles. Usually wet during the vegetative stage and dry during the flowering stage.
This is important as the roots are not as effective at extracting nutrients from the soil in dry cycles. The
energy stored in the fan leaves becomes a food bank during those times. I have seen research papers that
indicate a direct relationship between soil moisture and nitrogen uptake, for example.
Indoors, cultivated plants are still getting fed high quality nutrients and do not need the stored leaf nutrients
as much.
I strip the fan leaves at the end of stretch because I am looking for maximum plant mass. I have strong
vertical lighting and a 10 ft ceiling.
K33ftr33z and most other indoor growers, are using horizontal lighting with height restraints. As they need to
keep the plants shorter they can use vegetative defoliating as a means of restricting plant height. As
k33ftr33z has demonstrated, restricting height does not necessarily equate to lower bud count. So the point
at which you defoliate is dependent upon your technique.
The decision to defoliate or not is dependent upon your strain. My plant reacts well to it. Some won't.
As the cannabis plant can only propagate in the wild by seed, seed production is it's primary function. It is genetically programmed to produce seeds at all cost. Since we usually don't allow seeds this energy gets
focused on flower development. The plant will grow flowers, no matter what you do to it.
Research has demonstrated that almost all parts of a plant are capable of photosynthesis. When the large
fan leaves are stripped, the plant shifts whatever photosynthetic production is needed to other plant parts.
And immediately begins new leaf growth. As the fan leaves are now gone and the only option left is the bud
leaves, growth occurs there.
I believe the same hormonal stimuli that redirects growth to the bud leaves causes enhanced bud production.
The fans leaves of an uncultivated plant are there primarily for developing plant mass and to store nutrients
for flower production.

So what he's basically saying is since we are constantly giving them so much more and better nutrient, after the strong formation of the plant, the leaf is of much less use than a grown in the wild, meager available nutrient, need to store food leaf. Makes a lot of sense to me.
 
I did a defoil around day 33 give or take a day or so on a Trans Siberian Auto. She seems to have taken it well but I am a bit concerned about the slowing of flowering. I would imagine that this normal but how long is an average slow down in your experience?

After defoil
IMG00198-20121015-2201.jpg
 
im unsure if bassman has experience with defoliating auto's so ill just give you a quick snip of my grow.

i regularly defoliate my normal plants now, but was afraid of doing autos because of the slowdown, but once pistils started gathering in numbers i dived in and cut the lot. since then i seem to have had no vertical growth (my grow tip is less than 1cm from my t5s) in the last 72-96 hours, but bud leaves have grown stupidly fast, after about 72 hours i see more pistils starting to appear and visible calyxs forming.

next time im going to ignore all my fears and defoliate from the start.

this needs further testing as WHEN to cut leaves still needs dialing in and whilst Bassmans method makes complete sense, im developing a belief that deliberatly culling immature leaves forces the plant to make another node sooner in desperation. ;)

edit: oops missed a sentence.
Please bear in mind tho that im not following the methods of someone with 3 decades of expertise, this triumvirate of defoliating gods have their system dialed in pretty well by now, i have come to it on my own before ever reading or even hearing about defoliation as a high yield technique, so the odds are high that i make a load of mistakes they wouldnt make, but its also just as likely that the 'new skool' has blundered onto something the old pro's didnt think of =D
 
you have done well to get an auto growing that big, what schedule are you using for the lights, also what nutes and how much are you feeding, and the temps if you know what they are, im breeding autos to try and increase yield and growth, i also need to work with different lighting schedules to find the best for these autos, the last auto i harvested i got less than a 1/4, on average id say im hitting 20g per auto, so im hoping to grow out the seeds from the auto i crossed with a none auto plant and this should give me a bigger yield,

so im experimenting with autos till i get a decent yielding strain, i would be a bit weary of removing leaves on an auto, but to defoliate its best to remove and leaves that have a stem of 1.5 inches or more, so i have done this with one of my plants, and after 2 days the size of the buds is shocking, it really has made the buds bigger, would they of get bigger without me doing this, its hard to say, harvest day will tell me everything i need to know, but so far so good, id only remove leaves from an auto that was blocking light and stopping new bud sites from growing,

but that auto looks great, how old was it when it started flowering and what schedule have you used from day 1, im writing all the info down so i can work on my own breeding program and try and produce a gret auto, then i can pass on some seeds to a select few mates for them to try, hopefully ill be able to get it stable enough to guarantee me 100% auto seeds, crossing an auto with a none auto will give me seeds, but only a 1/4 will turn out auto, so ill be getting the best male and female thats auto and cross them together, this will then give me 100% auto seeds, plus im ordering that silver solution to make some auto fem seeds,

its a long process but im all ready on the way.
 
with autos i have had good luck,weight has been decent on cream caramel and himalaya blue diesel, average of 1/2-1oz dry, height as tall as 28 inches, i have not tried much defol a few big fans is all, but i do worry about slowdown i think lst may be best for autos, but defol is worth a look, i have plenty of beans, if i do it i'll bring some results here:thumb:
 
As previously mentioned by gig, I have no experience with autos and really wouldn't want to make it sound like I'd know what I'm talking about with them. But hey, if you don't mind wasting a plant, give it a go with a hard defoliation. Let us know what your experience is on it.

** I highly suggest, anyone that has read this far, go back to post #30 and carefully read it. Twice. The guy I quoted there has gotten as much as 20oz from a single plant, in hydro, indoors. I think his theories have some merit.
 
donpaul.p said:
you have done well to get an auto growing that big, what schedule are you using for the lights, also what nutes and how much are you feeding, and the temps if you know what they are, im breeding autos to try and increase yield and growth, i also need to work with different lighting schedules to find the best for these autos, the last auto i harvested i got less than a 1/4, on average id say im hitting 20g per auto, so im hoping to grow out the seeds from the auto i crossed with a none auto plant and this should give me a bigger yield,

so im experimenting with autos till i get a decent yielding strain, i would be a bit weary of removing leaves on an auto, but to defoliate its best to remove and leaves that have a stem of 1.5 inches or more, so i have done this with one of my plants, and after 2 days the size of the buds is shocking, it really has made the buds bigger, would they of get bigger without me doing this, its hard to say, harvest day will tell me everything i need to know, but so far so good, id only remove leaves from an auto that was blocking light and stopping new bud sites from growing,

but that auto looks great, how old was it when it started flowering and what schedule have you used from day 1, im writing all the info down so i can work on my own breeding program and try and produce a gret auto, then i can pass on some seeds to a select few mates for them to try, hopefully ill be able to get it stable enough to guarantee me 100% auto seeds, crossing an auto with a none auto will give me seeds, but only a 1/4 will turn out auto, so ill be getting the best male and female thats auto and cross them together, this will then give me 100% auto seeds, plus im ordering that silver solution to make some auto fem seeds,

its a long process but im all ready on the way.
Click to expand...

DP,
I changed my avatar! Its Spring!!!
 
Thank you TS. I hope you continue to gain lots of knowledge from the experience of others. I constantly ask and learn from others here.
 
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