Flowering tips and looking to grow knowledge. Input appreciated and any wisdom you can share. I am stressed about my little tent children. Thank you

Bud site doesnt show directly after entering flowering, for photoperiods it is when switched to 12/12. Dont remove leaves from autoflower plants, just move it aside. If its photoperiods, just cut it.

Don't do popcorn that's outdated, you need to do the wrangler.

Don't remove leaves unless they are causing some sort of elevated risk - like causing condensation to occur on itself or other leaves due to close contact. Leaves do more than absorb light. If th eplant has too many relative to whatever variables control it, it will shed leaves and when they require little to no effort to pull them off, that's fine, too. leaves covering bud sites is irrelevant barring something extreme. Again, constant physical contact would be bad, but just shielding light is fine. There is 100x more chlorophyll in leaves, therefore 100x more photosynthesis.. the amount of photosynthesis taking place in buds and stems should never be maximized over leaf's top surface. Unless you are causing 100x more surface exposure to buds compared to the leaf you removed from light, it's a net loss. apical dominance is why a bud will develop well or not. I constantly leave leaves over buds just because of this oft-repeated myth. Yet to see it have any impact. popcorn buds just means small buds. could be something extra low on plant, or from overgrowing the plant relative to its footprint. Too many mouths to feed (too many bud or flowering sites) will distribute a similar mass... The potential mass is most strongly ocrrelated to total light absorbed, barring any human error of over-pruning etc. You only need 2-3 colas per sq ft to maximize yield. I like 2.5 ... depends on how much axillary growth (branching) you allow, too. In this range you still get some nice colas but nothing so large you have to worry about bud rot... Not all genetics form huge colas. Worry more about grams per sq ft or m^2 etc.. that tells you better information to assess yield. Being able to achieve similar yields with less vege time also helps assess your methods...

Hey there! Don't stress about your "tent children," you're doing a great job. A flowering site and a bud site are actually the same thing it's just any spot on the plant where those first white hairs appear and buds begin to develop. You should definitely remove those shaded, sad-looking leaves near the bottom; they don't get enough light and just drain energy that the plant could use elsewhere. Tucking big leaves is a solid move to expose lower sites, but if it’s still too crowded, a bit of strategic defoliation is even better for light and airflow. When people talk about "popcorn," they mean those small, fluffy buds at the bottom that never fully develop; removing them (lollipopping) helps the plant focus all its energy on the big, dense tops. Happy Growing Growmie🌱

flowering and bud sites are the same if it is green then you can still be getting mobile nutes appropriated by the plant upward and be having metabolic processes running, once any tissue is dead remove it. remove it, not throw it down to rot tucking is fine, play with apical dominance and your grow style to minimize this in the future lollipopping is taking off the foliage from a branch and is a somewhat confusing technique just in how it is applied...sometimes people will do a defoliation that ends up like this near early mid flower. usually folks are talking about a defoliation late late in flower that is skewed to heavily strip lowers and leave flowering sites at the top. this relates to popcorn flowers/nugs as popcorns or larf occur when secondary metabolite energy is spread too broad in a plant (too many bud sites and only X amount of energy to build them) or too low relative to the canopy (same energy problem, but not because the plant itself is maxxed but because the canopy height makes it such that youd likely burn or ruin your uppers to reach the lowers, etc) tons of ways to do this. magnitudes upon magnitudes less of ways to do this proper with good technique and fundamentals. there has never been a better time to be a cultivator though. the rewards have never been higher, the crops have never been this good (objectively by lab analysis), the intersection of REAL science with this space is currently occurring.