Hey CJ,
It’s an old thread from 2016 so a lot of those peeps have moved on..
What is food for a plant? Photons yep light is their main food. Rhetorical but how do we capture more food? By keeping all the fan leaves… Fan leaves are what build buds…. fan leaves are how we get photosynthesis, fan leaves help with transpiration aka the movement or shedding of water, fan leaves are also where already processed nutrients are stored,
Ever heard of high brix? You use refractometer to measure sugars in the plant. Once you get above like 14 brix insects choose to leave the plant. Insects find and attack weak plants but they move out under high brix conditions. One of the rules of high brix is to avoid any & all defol… the only thing you defol is 1 fan leaf periodically so you can roll it, crush it & squeeze just 1 drop of plant juice onto refractometer lens to take a measurement.
So yes many people swear by defoliation but typically it just forces a plant to add more leaves to replace the ones you just trimmed off. Yellowed out fan leaves look bad to humans but the plant doesn’t care. Towards end of flower the plant will yellow out a lot of fan leaves- this just indicates the plant is pulling those stored nutrients out & using them to build buds.
So personally I don’t monkey with fan leaves regardless of how bad they look. My deal is to pick them up after they have fallen from the plant.
But as always- to each their own!
It’s an old thread from 2016 so a lot of those peeps have moved on..
What is food for a plant? Photons yep light is their main food. Rhetorical but how do we capture more food? By keeping all the fan leaves… Fan leaves are what build buds…. fan leaves are how we get photosynthesis, fan leaves help with transpiration aka the movement or shedding of water, fan leaves are also where already processed nutrients are stored,
Ever heard of high brix? You use refractometer to measure sugars in the plant. Once you get above like 14 brix insects choose to leave the plant. Insects find and attack weak plants but they move out under high brix conditions. One of the rules of high brix is to avoid any & all defol… the only thing you defol is 1 fan leaf periodically so you can roll it, crush it & squeeze just 1 drop of plant juice onto refractometer lens to take a measurement.
So yes many people swear by defoliation but typically it just forces a plant to add more leaves to replace the ones you just trimmed off. Yellowed out fan leaves look bad to humans but the plant doesn’t care. Towards end of flower the plant will yellow out a lot of fan leaves- this just indicates the plant is pulling those stored nutrients out & using them to build buds.
So personally I don’t monkey with fan leaves regardless of how bad they look. My deal is to pick them up after they have fallen from the plant.
But as always- to each their own!