Ditto brother. My scene is exactly like yours (waaay overvegged), even looks the same. And they got way too tall also, so I was wondering the same thing: should I strip the whole plant [3 feet] except for the top 1 foot, leaving a ??highrise?? canopy sitting 2+ feet above the netcups, with only bare stems beneath?
Ed Rosenthal swears by this method, you may have seen pictures of his pruned plants: just a 1-foot cola at the end of every main branch (and the smaller branches removed completely). Then he stakes ??em so each branch/cola sits 6? apart in squares.
It makes fewer, larger colas which he says increases yield. But the world of growing is full of bad advice from ??experts??, and I??ve always wondered if doing that reduces yields. All the leafage in the ??underbrush?? is receiving some light (which adds up) and producing sugars, etc. that feed the buds above. Pruning like that and ending up with what almost looks like a trimmed cola, with just the leaves around the bud in the last (top) foot of each branch, doesn??t seem like there would be enough leaf to produce power for that bud. Although leaving the leaves that are below the 1-foot mark means a lot of trim [??trim harvest!? ].
In my own limited experience, the people I know who end up with the most weight don??t do any pruning at all; when the plants are cut there is a lot of useless brush and a significant amount of too-small-to-be-called-a-bud trim. But?. In spite of that, their overall weight of big nuggets is still more.
I tried the Ed Rosenthal extreme pruning method one crop, and it??s nice while it??s growing; all there is are these big solid branches (you??re just thinking about how much work you??ll be saving at trimming time). But my yield was disappointingly low. That may have been due to some f***ups during that grow, so I??m still not sure which methods?? best, only that not pruning at all definitely works good.
Anybody got really good results with Ed??s pruning technique?