Quote Originally Posted by picklesrskankin
Seeing you lop off all that on some really nice looking plants makes me have a little more faith in my decision to cut off just a little a week ago. I hope yours turns out to be a good decision, because that will answer my question with proven results. It would be great to get a few updates. I'm heading into the end of week 3 now(day 18 ), and finally starting to see some great results. Alot of the lower branches with popcorn buds on them are starting to die off. So if this works as well as we all hope, I'll jump on that idea and get rid of a few more branches/fan leaves.
Let me throw in a word of caution, along the lines of what PR was getting at above. It is very dangerous to do something like this to your entire crop. I took a big chance that I might loose an entire 3 months of work with what I did yesterday, although I was fairly confident that I could get away with it. Upon checking this morning, all is OK and everyone is reaching up to the lights.

Let me further explain what justified my actions, because as a general rule it is NOT a good idea to stress your girls like this.

Some people do this in stages too, thinking that a few small things now and then is not as stressful. They will take off leaves here and there, a few each day when necessary. I decided to do it all at once, on one day only and then totally leave them alone from that point on. I am betting that they will recover from this assault because of where I am in the grow.

I am at that point in flower (around the 5 week point) where the buds are fairly well developed and we are about to go to the home stretch and add weight to these buds. This is the point where all of us see the lower fan leaves yellowing or even turning brown and falling off. The plant is shifting its resources up to the buds at this point and shutting down the processes that are no longer necessary for vegetative type growth. Before now, those large fan leaves were serving a purpose, supporting new bud growth, but now they are just blocking light and air flow. I became the big storm that removed them.

Some of my plants may react negatively to this and believing that it is now the end of their world, will attempt to hermaphrodite in order to continue the species. I will be watching for this and will pick off nanners if I see them, but at this point in the grow I am not too worried about it. There are roughly 4 weeks left in this grow. By the time a nanner was able to develop enough to produce pollen at this point, there would not be enough time to pollinate a bud and develop seeds before harvest. Also, since the girls are now very bare underneath the active buds, it will be an easy matter to see any hermaphroditic growth before it becomes an issue.

I will stress here however, that what I did with this experiment may not be suited to a novice or casual grower who does not have the time or experience to get in there and spend some extra time knowing their plants. I will NOT recommend this technique to the typical medial grower... your meds are simply too important to risk.