Popcorn Buds

[jjh1957]

I,m starting week 4 of flower, when I went to flower I pinched all the small buds under the canopy to concentrate the energy to the large buds on top. Now the popcorn buds are reappearing. Is it worth it to pinch them off again, or at this point will I do more stress to the plant than good.

 

[señorsloth]

ya keep taking them off if you want, lol i like to really make sure i get them down to the main stem so they don't come back, but i don't like to trim the popcorn, i have always thought, if the popcorn is so big you need to trim it you probably could have flowered earlier and if you flowered early enough then the few small stray calyxes wont hurt the overall yield, and will contribute to the hash ball after harvest. that is only my opinion though and only really applies to sog, since most other styles of growing involve some sort of lolypopping.

one thing too consider, trimming anything living from your plant will cause some stress, though i think it is proportional to the size of the plant, a seedling will be a lot more stressed by the loss of one leave than a 6 foot bush. Even extensive defoliation throughout flowering only seems to lengthen flowering by a week or two at the most(too long for me though!), and only causes hermies in the most fragile of genetics. so you probably wont be setting your plant back a whole lot by trimming it but consider this;

if the plant has already put a decent amount of energy into producing a decent amount of larf below your canopy, do you really think your plant will have time to REPRODUCE that amount above your canopy? i believe it's best to trim it when it's VERY small if you are going to trim it, so as to stop the production of buds+wasted energy below the canopy, before it starts. after all trimming half an ounce of popcorn below makes little to no sense unless you will gain at least that much weight above the canopy. the farther along into budding you go the less chances you will have that the amount you removed will help, since what you are removing is in effect a constantly changing fraction of energy wasted/energy about to be wasted. At a certain point your plant has already wasted more energy producing the popcorn it has than it will save by ceasing to produce anymore. at that point your just throwing away hash material for no real gain in above canopy weight. as your plant moves from adding bulk to buds to maturing what it already has this will become the reality.

so if you plan to remove popcorn, get it as soon as possible, so the plant doesn't waste energy making it in the first place, if your too late, realize that you wont gain much by losing it and leave it to mature for hash.

 

[jjh1957]

Thanks, that was pretty much my thoughts, I just hate taking flowers off my little girls. I guess I'll take the small buds off, and leave the larger ones. I'll try to give them as much light as I can.

 

[Hank Hemp]

4 weeks flowering it's time to start leaving them alone.

 

[jungliedunglies]

Might depend some on whether you grow for personal or otherwise............I hate smokin what I consider to be popcorn, to me it tastes like shit, and there's no reason I have to smoke it with everything else that's on the plant.

I just hash it; pretty much all the way through. Might not be the best for yield, but it suits my palate better YMMV.