Banana Purple Punch - first grow

Never do heavy defoliations unless you want to stress your plants and limit it potential health and yields. Every leaf is a power factory that makes the energy to grow the flowers. Less leaves = less energy being made = less potential growth..............it is that simple! Also, buds do not need direct light to grow. Light spectra we humans can not see actually penetrate upper leaves to strike lower leaves anyhow, making leaf removal pointless. Buds are like fruit, they grow all over the plant, not just on the sunny side. The leaves are also a vital resource of pre-made nutrients (carbs, sugars, amino acids etc) that your plant will draw upon during flowering, as it is more efficient to do this rather than make new growth elements (carbs, sugars, amino acids etc) and grow flowers at the same time. This process of recycling is what is responsible for the stage commonly known as "the fade". So, without the older leaves, not only do you reduce the plants ability to make energy, you also rob it of a vital reserve of growth elements it needs to use for flower development. In forty years of growing, I am yet to see a plant that gets rid of its own perfectly healthy, green, energy producing leaves for no reason. It is only people who think they know better than thousands of years of evolution that remove leaves from a plant that is at the pinnacle of efficiency and perfection.

Simple answer - absolutely not. You only remove what is necessary to remove. LEaves are not just solar panels. They are the manufacturing plants for necessary building material. they are lungs. you've probably read somehwere that CO2 is your limiting factor? so, reducing co2 intake would be a major negative unlikely to be compensated for by whatever bro science is saying about defoliation. blocking buds is not a real problem. that's something people made up that sounds right / scienc-y but has no evidence. I've been purposely leaving leaves directly blocking light from buds and comparing outcomes for numerous plants just to prove the point further. Apical dominance dictates where resources are uses, not where the light hits in any common sense context. why: ATP is highly mobile. it's pumped into the phloem. The minerals you feed and the sugar it produces from photosynthesis is ever-present in the phloem all over the plant. Where the light hits does not have much of an impact on where it gets used in any normal circumstance. That is more about apical dominance. therefore, even if you cover up a bud, it will develop just like any other bud from similar vascular tissue and height on the plant. Can't compare some dainty side branching to a primary branch's buds etc... but apples to apples, they develop the same. buds are sex organs. they have 1/10th to 1/100th the amount of photosynthesis taking place per square inch. It's rather stupid to maximize this type of plant material for light absorption, lol.

Hello Shigg, You only defoliate the leaves that cause one of the problems below. 1. Leaves are stacked on eachoter and moist can not escape. 2. Leaf is blocking airflow. 3. A large leaf does block a huge amount of light for the leaves below. Next to the reasons mentioned above defoliation is only decreasing yield!!! Happy Growing Buddy! 💚