[RuralRoute420]

Do you think it really affects the plant that much if you cut off the larger leaves 1-3 days before chop for max light distribution - plust it makes harvest a little easier.....any opini ns?

[Hot-Rod]

In my opinion, 3 days are not going to make a difference at all...

[agent 420]

Light distribution won't matter much if there are no large fan leaves to take in the light for the photosynthesis process. The leaves absorb the light, not the bud right?

1-3 days wont make any differance. But, if you take a fan leaf off earlier it will affect the bud its attached to. The bud will be smaller than it would have been with the fan leaf attached. Notice how the leaves yellow in the end days of budding? Thats the plant absorbing the energy from the leaf. No leaf=No extra energy.

Hope this helps,
Seed

i find lower light levels towards the end of flower make for happier harvests :smile:

TRIMMING FAN LEAVES DAYS BEFORE WACK
Do you think it really affects the plant that much if you cut off the larger leaves 1-3 days before chop for max light distribution - plust it makes harvest a little easier.....any opinions? yeah, pointless.

[RuralRoute420]

so pulling light away farther would(might) make them happier? i've often wondered this...

I've had small plants that were a few weeks from harvest attacked by grasshoppers ( a plague of Biblical proportions it was!) that ate all the fan leaves and many of the smaller 5 and 3 fingered leaves too and these plants seemed to resin up more than those that were not so badly attacked or hardly touched..but that's hardly scientific evidence!.

btw leaves are not in the way of buds..that's silly talk....think of it like this - leaves are the plant's solar panels..the more you remove, the less energy it is able to absorb ( but of course this applies to normal growing styles and conditions...but plants under scrog and other intense indoor methods benefit from some fan leaf removal during the first trimester of flowering)..of course yellowed leaves have done their job and can be removed ...

we need to experiment with leaf removal under controlled conditions (by using clones and side by side conditions) to test whether removing large leaves in the last 15, 10 or 5 days improves resin weight of the plant.

I readily remove any leaves that are yellowed and about to drop...all cannabis plants require less ferts in the last weeks of their lives.......so you should aim to grow your plants with reduced feeding towards their end , many of the fan leaves have dropped in the last few weeks of flowering anyway ..so gradually reduce fert strength down to just plain water for the last 10 ~ 3 days (depending how you grow and how the plants are growing and waht they are growing in etc)...

my guess is that plants with fans and other larger leaves removed 15 ~ 10 days before harvest would yield slighlty less bud weight and bud size..but what bud is there would have more resin.

[kingjames488]

i know this is an old thread... but i have a new perspective on this.

I herd of a grow one time where the lights broke for a while before harvest and produced almost rock hard buds!!

so maybe if the larges fan leaves were trimmed a day or 2 before harvest then the buds would just fill in more and become more solid? idk... just a thought.

[Wait...What?]

flowers want bees
leaves want co2 and light
roots want oxygen, moisture, and cations to exchange.

[mean mr.mustard]

I hope the thread starter meant a few and not all fan leaves. I can't condone cutting them all off. Taking a few a week before harvest will let the glands swell and the bud still puts on a lil extra weight. A few days is too little time and more than a week and you really will be missing some weight. The point remains that the leaves are needed but if it lets light to lower budsites without compromising lots of energy... do it

Sometimes flowers want birds and sometimes they don't need anything but the wind to pollinate themselves (cannabis). Leaves sometimes want oxygen and darkness to respirate. Dusted off a three year old thread... wow