Spyder7answered grow question 4 years ago If this is your first grow, they recommend you don't remove anything unless its already dead or you need to because of disease/bugs. Since your plant is healthy, but you;re still only in early veg, I would not defoliate. Its too early, even if you're going to. Instead I'd look at LST'ing (maybe when its a little taller) and pulling it down opposite that stem that is coming up. You'll get a very nice structure from this that you can later add HST techniques too, but there's no reason to cut that off now and defoliation is not done this soon (too much stress to soon: you need more growth before taking any off).