Trimming is very crucial in improving the yield and quality of your marijuana plant. It’s an innermost endeavor between the plant and the gardener and enables you to look closely at your plants and check their health. It may feel strange to purposely trim marijuana plants, but these parts will not generate quality buds because they will not receive enough light and they will get shaded out by the cannabis buds and leaves growing over. Trimming the branches would allow the plant to redirect its resources and energy to the quality cannabis buds that would receive a lot of sunlight. And you also want to cut off the dead and yellow leaves on the plant as they only waste the plant’s resources and will only just be a waste on nutrients.
The proper way to Trim your Marijuana Plants
How to trim marijuana plants? When trimming, don’t tear a leaf with just your hands, but instead, cut them off with a knife or scissors just make sure that the tool of your choice is very sharp before you use it.
Cannabis growers are trimming marijuana plants successfully with these two things:
- After your trim marijuana plants, water it immediately. This reduces the number of shocks to your cannabis plant while also strengthening the growth.
- Include plant foods when watering
These two tips on trimming marijuana plants could make your trimming high-yielding and less likely to damage your plant or slow down its growth. If you want to be extremely careful, then you must only trim the leaves that already looked unhealthy, and if they have brown tips or turning yellow if their lobes are partly eaten, and if they’re faded at all, then you can safely detach or remove those leaves. And you could also try detaching the original shaded leaves from branches that you have already trimmed. It is safe to do this after the branches start producing new leaves. Its old leaves would yellow and would die eventually, so by detaching them earlier, you could allow your cannabis plant to concentrate its important resources on other things. Detaching these leaves will also give more sunlight to the smaller leaves nearer to the base of the plant that gets them to grow quickly and generate more chlorophyll.
Pruning Your Plants the Right Way
Trimming marijuana plants during vegetative. The vegetative period of your cannabis plants is important because it’s the time that the plant sets up strong roots and takes shape. And it is also the time the most experienced growers would try to trim their marijuana plants. Trimming your cannabis plant isn’t mandatory, as the cannabis plant could grow in its normal shape. But, this shape means light distribution would be uneven and you will end up with large buds at the top that would slowly get smaller as you get the lower areas. Careful trimming would make sure enough light exposure throughout the cannabis plants, resulting in healthier plants and better yields.
When to Start Pruning Cannabis
When to trim marijuana plants? You must start trimming your cannabis plants early in its vegetative stage once they’re still small enough to receive all of the light throughout the foliage. As you begin to trim and train your cannabis plants, you would want to increase the canopy so that the plants get more as light as possible. You could time your cannabis plants regularly until they reach the second week of flowering phase. Trimming past that timeline could have different effects on your yields, and they would return to vegetative growth to fill up their losses.
3 of the Best Trimming Techniques
If you’re planning to train your cannabis plants by trimming, there’s a lot of various ways to choose from. And if you have already grown a few harvest, pick the technique that works best for you. Every method comes with its own set of obstacles and advantages, so pick carefully. Sometimes you can also use more than one method altogether to make a combined plan to pick from.
Yield around 5 ounces every Plant with Topping
Most growers usually misinterpreted topping. However, it’s a training method worth trying.
Topping helps escalate your cannabis plant’s to obtain sunlight. This method is important if you’re growing indoors since your light is limited, unlike natural sunlight. Topping cannabis please involves trimming off the major shoot at the top, which strengthens the growth of more branches and shoots. In the long run, it would turn the plant’s entire shape into a downward-facing cone. Other single growing shoots may generate a bigger individual branch, topping the plants would give you 4 colas that could absorb the best light intensity. Once you top a cannabis plant, the whole plant has to approach more light.
The advantages of topping includes:
- Bushier plants with more branches
- More leaves
- Bigger buds
Some cannabis growers don’t like topping due to their slowed down growth to a particular extent or might generate smaller branches. Even though individual colas may not be as big, the increasing yield is much higher than an untopped cannabis plant. Topping must be done early for the lesser negative effect on the cannabis plant and once it’s about 10 inches tall and has several intercodes is a great idea. However, you could start topping your plant as soon as your plant is likely strong. Examine the secondary growth that’s located near the low loves and this is a sign that your plant could stand topping.
Fimming Makes Four Buds Out of One
Fimming is the incomplete removal of the latest shoot of the plant. Once done, it produces 4 mains buds instead of one. A fimmed cannabis plant is larger and not as tall as the common plant. This also has more leaves exposed to light, creating more light to be captivated. While the procedure harms the cannabis plant just a little bit, most recover very well, making it a beneficial way of increasing yield.
The advantages of topping includes:
- Better light absorption
- More leaves
- Wider plants
Cannabis plants that have more leaves that could captivate light would produce a higher yield, and the fimming method increases the light exposure to the leaves. The light that does not hit the leaves and fall in considered lost energy. Fimming methods make sure that more leaves receive light. This method is very useful to outdoor growers and is the secret to those gigantic outdoor cannabis plants. It does also work for indoor cannabis plants, but it’s easier to use extra plants to ensure no light will be wasted. If your growing room is not very tall, fimming is quite useful. In the case of Sativa plants, they grow very fast and could become very tall rather than wide. Fimming method helps the plants grow wider rather than taller since the cannabis plants momentarily stop growing lengthwise and mostly grow in width. And now, you could then leave some room between plants while keeping a nice green blanket of leaves.
Lollipop your Plants for Bigger Colas
Lollipopping is also a trimming technique that removes the lower growth of your cannabis plants to encourage better bud development over. By detaching the competing growth, and energy is directed to the main cola sites. This method is useful in setups with no side lighting to reach the lower part of the cannabis plant.
The main idea behind lollipopping:
- Push the cannabis plant to concentrate on generating bigger colas
- detached the overly shaded areas of the cannabis plant. They possibly will not do much
It is called “lollipop” because of the shape of the plant once you have done it. Once the lower growth is detached, all that remains in the plant with a long stem and one more or larger branches over. Detaching the lower bushier growth could also enhance air circulation around the bottom parts of the plant where the humidity sometimes builds up, particularly after watering. For bushy cannabis plants that are allowing other fungal infections, because it lowers the chance, making it beneficial when cultivating outdoors in moist climates. Most cannabis growers agree that lollipopping must take place throughout the vegetative stage. Do it as a continual procedure or all in one go but do so around weeks before you start the 12-hours of light and 12-hours of darkness. In this way, your cannabis plants have more time to recover from the trauma you just give them through the start of their flowering mode.
The advantages of topping includes:
- Improved circulation
- Larger colas
- Energy conservation
Some people think that you must never lollipop when the cannabis plant has started flowering. But, if the main work is done during the vegetative phase, you could do some light maintenance during the flowering period, and you might want to prune those branches that have not made it to the shade or remove the tiny buds that start to form on the lower branches.
