Deficiency

Claiming theres no evidnece when its all over the net is pure ignorant.The biggest autos grown are the ones that get savagly stripped.The plant gets a good deal of energy from the light to the lower leaves,its certainlky more than minimal.I think its 1ft lower than the top decreases by 50% that may mean half a foot is 75%,whatever it is its certainly more than minimal.Theres no evidence that the plant needs all the leaves so saying it does is moronic.

The idea that removing leaves is somehow beneficial is the laughable bheaviour. there's no evidence to support the claims of 'improved yield' or 'fatter secondary level buds' CO2 is your limiting factor, and removing leaves reduces co2 intake. That alone should cuase someone to rethink whimsical defoliation for bro-science hypotheses. It also stores building blucks. Energy prodution, co2 intake, building block production, building block storage... leaves are incredible organs with specific functions that are foudnational to everything. Do not remove leaves unless there is an exceptionally good and pressing matter that causes you to do so. the plant does 'know' if it has too few or too many, even if it is controlled through some hormonal response or otherwise not a central nervous system, whic plants obvoiusly do not have. no, they don't think, but their resulting homeostasis is a product of millions of years of evolution... it really does 'know' better.... despite the passive aggresive dissent below, lol. lol what is 'basic stimuli' bwahah. go get a minor or major in biology and chemistry and get back to me on that one. Ccheck out 'to defoliate or not' on cocoforcannabis.com... in fact read any and all of their articles. Avoid the comment section because as always it's just filled with science deniers and people that think they can learn finer points of biology through just growing a plant, bwahaha. the human senses are too unresolved to do so with any accuracy in addition to a non-scientific context with variables flip-flopping all over the place and comparing apples to oranges... mostly in some personally biased way. The amount of photosynthesis taking place outside the top layers of a leaf's surface is minimal. It provides minimal to no benefit to maximize photosynthesis on stems or flowers. They did not evolve to perform those functions. Flower is a sex organ. Do you expext your balls to do something other than produce sperm? Don't expect plant organs to do something they are not made to do. Also, the products of photosynthesis, sugars, are highly mobile throughout the plant. it's basically everpresent in the vascular tissue and any concnetration gradient that results is part of how it flows around the plant traversing semi-permeable membranes, so a gradient doesn't last long. Apical dominance is how a plant distributes resources and why some growth is stronger than other growth, not light hitting flower sites. Bro science often gets causality wrong, because it's an unsophisticared understanding to start. Having a couple years of biology and chemistry under your belt would avoid half of these arguments. when you have limited foundational knowledge it's easy to be duped into believing bro-science nonsense. it often 'sounds' good and superficially makes sense as long as you ignore existing knowledge, lol. They like to sound science-y but is far from it.

Your in vegging, you will be okay. Just wait a week or two for her to regrow some leaves and to ensure the issue is solved.

Your plants are fine. They won't skip a beat. Now you should be practicing your LST as you weave the branches through your net. If they were mine, I would not be changing the light cycle until you've begun to fill out the net. Things look pretty good so far.

Plants don't "know" anything. They're actually quite dumb. They're controlled by hormones and basic stimuli. Through a variety of training techniques we encourage these plants to grow well outside their "normal" capacity than in the wild, where it's notable that plants are constantly losing leaves throughout their grow due to bugs, animals and also natural shedding. The idea that a light defol, especially during veg, is somehow detrimental is comical.

Spot on. Get some light to those secondary bud sites which will make themfatter.The guys that grow thosemassive autos take 80% off and they get over 1lb off 1 auto.Positive stress can have as big impact.Facts are facts.Kyle Kusman is well respected in the industry and he's known for pushing his plants with defoliation.Iv just done mine,again and I'll flip the switch in several days.I'll do them again several days into flower taking leaves off here and there.Not posted any more pictures yet.Evidence shows that the majority of trained plants do better after some defoliation.Depending on strain.The more indica they are the more they tend to need it.

the plant knows when to shed leaves, you should allow it to decide. They look alive to me...