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I figured it was time to take some before and after shots of my insane atomic pruning. I hate that we can't use the "basic uploader" here anymore. Then I could have captioned the pics.
Anyways, you'll see 2 pics of a vegging plant. The first is before pruning, the second after. The 3 pics of a budding plant show the results of my pruning style. I took the closeups to show the bud quality way low on the plant. The blooming plant is at 6 weeks.
If you're shocked, I fully understand. When my buddy Commercial J told me he had perfected pruning the Pre 98 Bubba, I went to his grow op to have a look. The plants were 7 weeks into bloom and looked fantastic. This was at his "small" home grow and he was yielding 6lbs of Bubba under 4 lights in an 8x8 tray. Once these plants were finished and weighed, he used the technique on his commercial warehouse op.
I wanted to try this on my grow. At the time I had a 12 light live soil organic op going. He explained to me what to do, but it sounded too radical. I asked him to come to my grow and show me on a couple plants. When my plants were about 2.5 weeks into bloom, he showed up with his own shears. He told me to trust him. He then proceeded to destroy 2 of my plants...or so I thought. I truly though he was playiung some kind of sick joke. What fucking idiot would remove THAT MUCH healthy foilage from a plant. He assured me it was exactly what he did to his. Even then, I didn't trust him enough to hack up the other 97 plants.
When I harvested, I weighed kept 10 un-pruned plants seperate to compare weight with the pruned plants. I made sure the plants I selected were of average size or a little bigger. When I trim I have 2 piles of buds: One pile is the AAA grade buds, and one is the smaller buds for personal stash, gifts, paying trimmers, keif, and edibles. The untrimmed plants averaged just under 2 ozs total...with 1.5 ozs of AAA and .5 ozs of low grade. The pruned plants averaged just OVER 2 ozs...every bit AAA grade. They were also way easier to trim and looked healthier. I wished I had let him go balistic on the whole crop. I would have had 3 more lbs of AAA weed.
Even after the proof, I had a hard time pruning
enough leaves off the future crops. I would prune, and have Commercial J come over for a look. He would always say the same thing: "Take more"! Sure as shit, I would end up with an Lb of low grade. Everytime I would prune I was thinking "it's too much"...and everytime I would trim I would think "It wasn't enough. Several crops later, I finally developed the confidence to undertake the atomic prune.
One time, as if to prove that taking too much could be horrible, I over-pruned like a mother-fucker on one plant. I hacked that poor thing to shit. All I left were the bud sites, and the leaves that would one day be part of the buds. There was like nothing left. Well, it did affect the yield, but not that much. At that time I was growing smaller plants (and a buttload of them), that were averaging 1.25 ozs each. The over pruned plant came in at just over an ounce. But, when I though about it, that would have produced the same amount of AAA buds as an un-pruned plant. Since that little test, I haven't been afraid to go psycho-killer on the plants.
Here's the fine print. This technique works
for me in
my op with
my pheno of Pre-98 Bubba. I would not want anyone to just hack down a whole crop based on my results. I know most of you have
way too much growing savy to do that. When I'm growing the very low yielding and leggy OG's, I only remove a couple fan inside leaves. Sativa heavy strains hardly ever need any pruning. Which may be where the idea of "pruning is bad" came from. Those plants are sparce enough growing natural. In general, the bushier the plant, the better it seems to respond to pruning. You can also tell at trimming time. If you're ending up with a big ass pile of larf, some pruning may get the light down deep enough to turn that larf into high grade buds.
If I were to just remove a few leaves, I would remove the interior fan leaves in the upper third of the plant. The next level would be some lolipopping. The next would be large exterior fan leaves shading neighbor plants and preventing me from getting the plants close enough together. And then there's the atomic prune, as seen in the pic.
Goos luck to all of you in your growing endeavors. Send some positive energy to Hellraizer, who's having some stressful trouble in the grow room. We're thinking of you HR, and are all here to help if we can.
