Defoliate now or later?

everything that blocks a budsight/flower and you can't bend the leaf out of the way, remove it. I wait until after the stretch, when i don't feed veg nutrients anymore because often when i defloiate before stretch ends, i get a shit ton of new foliage so ill wait after. good luck!

Defoliation is a useful technique when applied properly but is often misunderstood by both people who are for and against it. It's more about airflow than light penitration. It's also gonna take some serious stripping down before "not enough leaves" ever becomes the limiting factor of an indoor grow, plants loose leaves in nature CONSTANTLY and a topped plant grows much denser than they do naturally. I'm not one for long, drawn out posts so I won't get into all the specifics. In your case, it's really unnecessary at this time. Let it stretch and see where it's at in a couple weeks. You shouldn't really be thinking about defoliation in cannabis unless you're canopy is very full and dense. I'm not talking about a squat, bushy plant that's sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty tent. I'm talking about wall to wall foliage.

Maybe the leaves twisting because they are competing for light, but even those are value-added as long as they don't cause condensation or all a pathogen to get a foothold etc. There is simply no good reason to blindly or ritualistically remove leaves. There should always be a specific reason to remove any 1 leaf, let alone defoliate it. A plant will quickly shed any leaf that is not value-added. If it keeps the leaf, it's still doing many useful things even if not absorbing much light. Don't believe the bro science nonsense that sounds anything like, "It allows the plant to focus on the flower" or "you need light to hit flower to develop well" -- both of these are total nonsense. the plant absolutely does not shift focus due to cutting leaves off, in fact the opposite will happen unless it's too deep into flowering and vege growth has abated completely - then, you are just left with a plant with too few leaves and it will not reach its potential. The products of photosynthesis are 100% mobile within the plant and apical dominance determines where resources are allocated, not where the light hits. Also, flower is a sex organ with 1/100th the chloroplast concentration of a leaf. Yes, some photosynthesis takes place there, but where it takes place has little to do with allocation and a leaf is 10 to 100 times more effective at photosynthessis than flower - it's a horrible trade to remove a leaf for light to hit a bud. Buds of similar apical dominance will develop similar buds whether shaded or not. For shits and grins I've purposefully trained leaves to cover up buds and it has zero effect - not because i doubted it. It's obvious with a modicum of biology knowledge and testing such an obvious and known thing is not productive or needed. They come out just like any other bud of similar apical dominance. This is a false belief perpetuated ad nauseum by people that don't have a lick of biology knowledge.