Anybody Want To Double Their Yield?- Desertrat's Top and Prune?

are you telling me there is no easter bunny? WTF? brick top you should have been a writer,maybe you are but good explanation.
 
sixstring2112 said:
are you telling me there is no easter bunny? WTF? brick top you should have been a writer,maybe you are but good explanation.
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Funny you should mention that but from 7th grade through college almost every teacher and professor I had told me I should become a writer. Being the uber-intelligent person that I am I naturally became a car dealer and a boat dealer and ended up part owner in a nursery rather than a writer.

I think what stopped me is for all my education I never really fully got the hang of comas and things. I believe that every single teacher and professor that told me I should become a writer then added that I would of course need someone to correct my punctuation and to trim my run-on sentences into numerous paragraphs and sentences. (Things like word processors and spell and grammar checkers did not exist way back when so a backup person would have been very needed indeed.)
 
Uncle Ben said:
Your advantage, eh? Bullshit, you need to learn what makes a plant tick and stop the theatrics and gimmicks. No better time to start than now, and while you're at it, learn what a plant's light saturation point means. What does physics have to do with anything? What light meter do you use relative to your nutrition program?

There is no such thing as "injury" when it comes to removing leaves. It becomes an issue of the redirection of auxins and the loss of photosynthetic carbo production, either temporarily or permanently.

You're sitting here dodging BT's valid questions.

UB
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You're projecting again. It is you who is avoiding addressing my points. As you will. Don't worry, i'll get to everybody's worthwhile post, as I always do. Just scurrying around getting ready to be gone for 8 days. Might be a couple of weeks before I get back here, might get a chance on the road, but be assured I will respond. God willing.

And that would be my nist certified zero to 40,000 foot-candle light meter. Will you take my word for that or are you going to question my integrity again? I guess I could take a pic of the certification document. And you get exactly the same answer if you do the geometry, so the meter's for people who don't understand the physics.

What you refuse to get is that I respect your botany knowledge and experience a lot, but that does not mean that there is nothing left to learn in the field of applied botany in the indoor cultivation of cannabis. I think this is a case where the unique environment of an indoor grow caused by the physics of artificial light makes what would be a stupid strategy outdoors to at least be an approach worth careful testing. You are showing your closed-mindedness by not carefully considering that there may be something here.

I want to think you're better than that.
 
my theory:

why does marijuana grow fan leaves?

energy storage : as long as we keep pumping her full of nutes she wont need much stored energy

light : all those fan leaves block light that could be going to lower nodes, and anything green creates photosynthesis, so remove those fan leaves while in veg, and everything will bush up instead of just the top of the plant. also helps if you tie down some plant main stems after topping

what else can absorb light? green buds! so when the plant is flowering, it is essentially replacing all the fan leaves with buds instead to collect sunlight
 
Brick Top said:
What remains questionable is how someone can reduce the amount of energy a plant can create by removing healthy leaves and how when healthy foliage is removed from a healthy plant a healthy plant will always attempt to replace the lost foliage so it will redirect energy that would otherwise go to other existing growth to replacing the lost foliage.

So how does the combination of decreased energy production and lost energy storage and redirected plant energy then used to replace lost healthy foliage equate to increased amounts of energy for growth? Someone who removes healthy leaves reduces the total amount of energy a plant can create and store so while energy will be diverted by trimming, just as with topping, there is also a net loss of total energy the plant will have to rely on for growth.

The belief of removing healthy leaves for bud development is based in flawed logic. Someone cannot increase plant energy by reducing it.

If the purpose is only to create shorter plants with thicker growth there is some logic behind what is claimed because energy will be redirected but even then it is questionable as to if it really is more beneficial than it is harmful and home experiments are not really conclusive proof in that the claimed outcome is always only based in what can be observed and what can be sensed when sampled. Due to genetic differences in plants that can appear to the human eye to be the same phenotype but really are not any observed results cannot be positively proven in a home experiment. All such results can only observed and sensed at best but never accurately tested and proved unless someone has access to a sophisticated lab and knows various testing procedures and carries them out at different stages of growth and documents anything and everything that occurs.

The question of how someone can increase plant energy by reducing a plant's ability to create and store energy still remains even when only talking about trimming while in a vegetative stage of growth. How does one add by performing subtraction?

Possibly the idea is sacrifice now for something else, possibly more, later. (Which could only occur if new growth after the initial trimming is not removed.) Even with that the question of is there an actual overall net gain or an overall net loss remains and real plant research says there should not be an overall net gain.

It all comes down to the simple basic question of how can someone add by performing subtraction?
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You are a good poster Brick Top, I respect the amount of time that you put into your posts.

I think part of the answer here is that we are not talking about a finite amount of energy. If you want bigger plants you veg them longer. Less energy over a longer period of time still provides enough energy to get the job done.

Now, IMO what desert rat is doing is sacrificing some of that energy and some of that time to cause the plant to change from a christmas tree shape to something more adaptable to lower light levels. This allows the plant to absorb more energy at later stages of life due to its more bushy shape. ER: the light can be closer to the bulk of the plant.

I can see how both arguments could still be consistent with the data provided.
 
dtp5150 said:
my theory:

why does marijuana grow fan leaves?

energy storage : as long as we keep pumping her full of nutes she wont need much stored energy

light : all those fan leaves block light that could be going to lower nodes, and anything green creates photosynthesis, so remove those fan leaves while in veg, and everything will bush up instead of just the top of the plant. also helps if you tie down some plant main stems after topping

what else can absorb light? green buds! so when the plant is flowering, it is essentially replacing all the fan leaves with buds instead to collect sunlight
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Yeah our buds are green, so they contain chlorophyll, but I bet if you removed every single leaf, your buds wont grow very well if even at all. Buds are supplied their sugars and whatnot for growth from the nearest fan leaves. Id like to have those large fan leaves attached to my budsites personally.

Besides, it just doesn't make sense for buds to take over photosynthesis for flowering as you suggested. Thats not their job. Its to reproduce. Why would nature want to double her workload? She wouldn't.

I like to think of the buds as queens, and the fan leaves and bud leaves are her servants. Those queens need someone to prepare food for her to eat, and well by god she's too regal to do it herself.
 
As the plant progresses in flower ...its turns its energy from leaf production to flower production thats why the leaves start loosing their color and turn yellow

I know i personally will strip almost all fan leaves for the last 2 weeks of flower... it allows the light to penetrate more and your buds get fatter
 
It's fascinating for me how much resistance there is to accept that pruning fan leaves can lead to advantageous redirection of growth. Topping is the removal of healthy tissue (the apical meristem for chrissakes); air pruning kills off the growing tips of the roots--- both of these are accepted at boosting yield even though they damage the plant. So there is not an inherrant conflict between plant 'damage' and boost of yield.

Desertrat has run a simple experiment; no, it does not take place in a lab in a perfectly controlled environment, but it has produced interesting results, which I think invites more experimentation. Instead of arguing how the result could not be valid, some of the experienced growers here would do well to try the experiment themselves. Nothing would validate this approach more than a fervent non-believer switching sides. It would be like Nixon going to China, lol.
 
desertrat, with all due respect, the following is the mindset you're endorsing and promoting for noobs that don't understand botany but instead want to believe in some gimmicktry. I'll address the following ill conceived comments, since they fall in line with your recommendations to make my point. (I see my comment about ripening grapes went over everyone's head).

dtp5150 said:
my theory:

why does marijuana grow fan leaves?

energy storage : as long as we keep pumping her full of nutes she wont need much stored energy
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Nutes? No. Nutes aka salts are used by the fan leaves for producing proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, enzymes, etc.

Extremely efficient Photon collectors, yes. Why do you think they extend so far out from the plant on long petioles and are so large?

light : all those fan leaves block light that could be going to lower nodes, and anything green creates photosynthesis, so remove those fan leaves while in veg, and everything will bush up instead of just the top of the plant.
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Wrong, they do not block light, they collect it. An apple will ripen, shaded by the branches and leaf mass above it.

what else can absorb light? green buds! so when the plant is flowering, it is essentially replacing all the fan leaves with buds instead to collect sunlight
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No it is not. If you're losing most of your fan leaves by harvest, it's YOUR fault. In spite of another popular paradigm parroted by The Herd around here, you are not applying good culture if you lose most of your fans leaves by harvest, it means you don't know what you're doing and/or are following the wrong advice.

Like I said before, "green buds" do NOT contain sufficient green surface area, leaf mass, to be of any REAL world benefit to the plant regarding good photosynthesis resulting in the production of bud.

You guys are more enamored with theories and fallacies than learning what makes a plant tick. You have to be (horticulturally) ignorant to think that by removing the very unit that produces bud, you'll get more bud.

UB
 
Uncle Ben, with all due respect, that's why I reply to almost all of those kinds of posts with caveats as to why I don't think someone's take on it is correct. Go back and look at the thread. I can lead a horse to water but it is not my fault if they drown in it. Just like anything in life, there are a few ways to do pruning right and millions of ways to prune wrong. Topping is one way to prune correctly. I think the removal of 5 or 6 fan leaves below the topped node will prove to be another. Let's let the results speak for the technique and please stop with the digs, questions about my integrity or my ability to run a valid experiment. I promise to continue to respect your knowledge of botany.
 
Nitegazer said:
It's fascinating for me how much resistance there is to accept that pruning fan leaves can lead to advantageous redirection of growth.
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IF, it results in leaf mass replacement equal to or greater than the initial removal. It's all in the balance.

Topping is the removal of healthy tissue (the apical meristem for chrissakes);
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And with what result? I don't think he is talking about topping, a training technique. He is talking about the wholesale removal of the very unit that produces bud (for chrissakes).

2. on the main branch only, prune every other fan leaf in a staircase pattern. this slows the growth of the main stem and for some reason stimulates the growth of secondary branches.
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....and induces (or should) foliar output from the axial node sites. So, what have you gained? You've removed plant material only to have it replaced? Doesn't make sense to me.

What's really funny, upon further examination of "the technique", if you top above the 4th node (step #1), you NO LONGER HAVE A "MAIN BRANCH". duh........ Instead of having one or two dominant leaders (main colas), you now have 8 secondarys. Your "main branch" is sitting there on the compost pile.

You'd know better if you understood what makes a plant tick, if you understood plant hormonal responses which I have elaborated on in my sticky topping thread.

I've seen this kinda of voodoo bullshit in its various forms for many years and lo and behold, you can count on every new crop of cannabis forum noobs to want to believe in something other than common botanical sense. It's human nature to be dreamers, be lazy, follow The Herd so you can be a party to it and get a feeling of acceptance. Popular opinion does not mean it's so. In fact, most popular opinions found in cannabis forums are ill conceived and flat ass wrong.

BTW, desertrat is parroting someone else which is what folks do. It's the message I'm dissing, not necessarily him (the messenger).

UB
 
It's human nature to be dreamers, be lazy, follow The Herd so you can be a party to it and get a feeling of acceptance. Popular opinion does mean it's so. In fact, most popular opinions found in cannabis forums are flat ass wrong.
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It is normal to follow the herd yet you mock him for making his own path?

I dont know jack shit about botany. I am dumb as a post about growing plants. The ones around me are lucky that they might make it to the end. I am not trying to speak as an expert grower or an expert botanist.

What I will ask is... How did botany develop? I mean the science of botany? Wasnt it trial and error and recording the observations of such in a scientific environment with a scientific method? Didnt it develop like all other sciences with the sharing of ideas in an effort to understand plant life? Wasnt there some point at which the science of botany did not exist and it simply grew (pardon the pun) from the base of observation?

Now, in this scenario I see a poster "desert rat" trying an *experiment* on his plants. He has a control group and he has a pruned group. And it appears at least for him that the pruned group outperforms the control group. You are bashing him for following the same process that developed the science of botany in the first place. Dont you think that is a tad hypocritical? Do you think that everything about botany ever to be discovered already has and the book is closed?

He is not trying to sell this info, he has nothing to personally gain from being right, in fact he is risking alot because he has no control over the experiments other people do and their success or more likely failure based on outside forces making the growing conditions not equal. In addition, there will always be people that will immediately attack his results based on their vast knowledge of (botany, growing, etc...) and say that it simply would not work that way.

What I appreciate is that he is taking the time to attempt experiments using the scientific method and publishing them for discussion. That is the most fundamental part of the scientific process. It generates thought and discussion and spins off further experiments. And even if all of them are done in this imperfect petri dish of outlaw growers there is a good chance that certain techniques could still increase yield on plants.

I dont know if I will ever try this technique or not, I am still trying to muddle through my first grow...

Thanks DR + rep for the effort.
 
NLXSK1 said:
What I will ask is... How did botany develop? I mean the science of botany? Wasnt it trial and error and recording the observations of such in a scientific environment with a scientific method? Didnt it develop like all other sciences with the sharing of ideas in an effort to understand plant life? Wasnt there some point at which the science of botany did not exist and it simply grew (pardon the pun) from the base of observation?
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Going back to the 12th century AD when it all began yes botanical science was nothing more than observation, trial and error but we have stepped out of the pre-dark ages and into the light of present day modern science. Going back to the days of looking, guessing and making decisions based on little or nothing more is not true scientific experimentation by today's standards and as shocking as it might be to some, we live in the now, today is where we exist. Such old-time ways proves nothing, especially when what is believed to be discovered through observation and assumption that is pure guesswork and nothing more flies in the face of proven botanical science.

If you wanted to build an aircraft would you ignore all the years and decades of advancement in aircraft design or would you instead ignore all of it and instead try to design and build something along the lines of what Orville and Wilbur Wright built?

What if NASA were given the task to return to the moon, rather than its latest given task, to help make the Muslim world feel better about itself, would NASA not bother to use what it has learned and instead attempt to recreate something along the lines of the Apollo space craft?

Why not just accept proven botanical facts rather than going back and attempt to recreate the wheel, and in doing so make it square rather than round?
 
Why not just accept proven botanical facts rather than going back and attempt to recreate the wheel, and in doing so make it square rather than round?
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Those proven botanical facts have been around since the same time people were SURE the earth was flat and the sun rotated around it because the earth was the center of the universe. It was science back then. Happily, things have changed.

Science is a process.... A never ending process.
 
NLXSK1 said:
It is normal to follow the herd yet you mock him for making his own path?
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He's not making his path. He is parroting what someone else did, as I said in the last line of my previous post. READ

I dont know jack shit about botany.
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Then it's time you learn, it's time you empowered yourself........ or wander around here blindly following crap advice, nutes, rip off products, etc.

Happy muddling,
UB
 
I love experiments and I am currently sub'd to this one and the CO2 one. I, like UB and BT do not endorse removing fan leaves but admit lots of folks do it and I see thier post as trying to point out certain things to new growers rather than a slam on this experiment.

I say to Desertrat, keep doing what your doing and nevermind the debate, it is after all your experiment and what others draw from it will be up to them. If we stop experimenting we will eventually stagnate, while there is no holy grail to induce huge buds there are techniques that have proven sucessful and those techniques were discovered thru expermintation

kudos for not only making your own path but also for sharing your journey!
 
UB,

I think we can safely all agree that leaves help the plant grow and removal at least temporarily reduces the plant’s ability to produce energy. Your arguments do not, however, address the experiment that has been conducted.

I would state the hypothesis Desertrat is working on as follows: Removing select fan leaves early in development promotes branching at the expense of short term plant growth; the resulting increased branching will lead to higher yields in some grow room setups (probably lower wattage indoor grows ie. <1000W).

A brief scan of research through Google brought up other experiments that could support or undermine Desertrat’s approach. Note that these were just quick finds, and may not truly apply to the questions at hand.

“Leaf Removal and the Apparent Affects of Architectural Constraints on Development in Capsicum Annuum (Green Peppers)” – Lisa P. Thomas and Maxine Watson. -- “Removing leaves within a branch system resulted in a significant decrease in further sympodial growth by that branch”

“The effect of leaf and shoot tip removal and explant orientation on axillary shoot proliferation of Codiaeum variegatum Blume var. pictum Muell. Arg. cv. Excellent” (Caladium) - Teresa Orlikowska, , Izabela Saba a and Danuta Kucharska
“The removal of all developed leaves from 1 to 1.5 cm shoots of Codiaeum variegatum Blume var. pictum Muell. Arg. ‘Excellent’…doubled the number of axillary shoots in comparison to non-defoliated controls.”

“A modeling exploration of branch extension, defoliation responses, and carbohydrate physiology in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.)- David Thornby, Jim Hanan
“Experiments showed that the development rate of cotton seedling’s main stems was not affected by defoliation regimes of varying severity (25-65%)”

Botany does not support the broad claim that any leaf removal reduces yield. If Desertrat’s experiment is being refuted with botany, than some sort of real analysis of the available literature is in order. Specifically, I would look for experiments with fruiting annuals where subtending leafs are removed and effects on branching are noted.
 
I love experiments too, been doing them for decades. How do you think the UB topping to get 2-4 colas came about? I just get rubbed the wrong way when someone fishes for noobie interest in a forum by starting a thread with a dreamie title of "anybody want to double their yields?" as if they've found some new fangled method. Ever thought that it could actually reduce your yields by half? Forums are full of such threads, there's a new now in Advanced. Trust me, whatever you do, it's been done before in some form or fashion. If you want to get the skinny on some bonafide empirical research conducted by a University, then buy Mel Frank's MJ Insiders Guide.

I presented my arguments, pointing out the fallacy that topping above the 4th node and you'll still have a "main branch". That's just not true, only noobs will fall for such crap. What's with the stair step drill, botanically? If removal of some fans is super duper, then it seems to me that removal of all is better.

Every time someone starts another one of these boring "remove fan leaves" threads I tell 'em now to remove all of them. :D

I "leaf" grape vines, but that is a drill for entirely different results. Removing leaves around the clusters for exposure to UV before the clusters have closed gives you a less herbaeous taste in a wine, toughens up the skin, and greatly improves skin anthocyanin production. Apples and oranges compared to cannabis.
 
Uncle Ben said:
He's not making his path. He is parroting what someone else did, as I said in the last line of my previous post. READ
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Well then he is parroting something someone else did that is enhancing his grow apparently. Isnt that what we all do here? Dont you advise people to parrot your growing techniques for success?

Then it's time you learn, it's time you empowered yourself
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I am learning every day through trial and error and experimentation. That is how botany and the other sciences were created. To assume that we know everything about botany is more than a little presumptuous.

........ or wander around here blindly following crap advice, nutes, rip off products, etc.
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There are more than two options...

Happy muddling, UB
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Thanks, it has been a blast so far...
 
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