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What is the Best Way to Prune Marijuana Plants?

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What is the Best Way to Prune Marijuana Plants?

Pruning is essential for improving the quality and yield of your cannabis plants. It’s an intimate practice between the gardener and the plant and allows you to closely look at your plants and check up on their health.

It might feel strange to intentionally cut off bits of your plant, but these parts won’t produce quality buds because they won’t receive a proper amount of light—they’ll get shaded out by the buds and foliage growing above.

Cutting off the branches will allow the plant to redirect its energy and resources to the quality buds that will receive plenty of light. You also want to prune off yellow or dead leaves on the plant—they have no use and will only waste the plant’s resources.

When manicuring marijuana, it is best to do so in a way that allows you to easily gather what has been manicured for further processing.

How to Prune Cannabis Plants Like A Pro?

A garden that receives a lot of light and nutrients will grow without control. To optimize the situation, we shall nip off certain branches or leaves. This will help the plant decide where to place its energy. Hence, the art of pruning requires a certain knowledge and critical thinking. The following sections serve as a guideline to make the technique a lot easier and more accurate.

Know When to Start Pruning 

Selecting the ideal time to cut your marijuana plants will be a factor impacting the quality of your crop. 

Regardless of the week in the cannabis life cycle when you decide to harvest, the perfect time of day to do so is in the morning; or, if we are talking about indoor cultivation, when the lights turn on. This is because at night the plant optimises its resin production.

Know What Parts to Prune

One of the toughest parts of pruning is determining which structure of the plant to remove. As a rule, we want to maximize two things: airflow around the plant and the area where leaves catch light. As a result, this will allow the plant to focus all its grow power on the most functional parts.

Therefore, we must follow a pattern where the leaves of the plant will concentrate on the top. Specifically, we want to cut off the branches at the lower part of the plant where it receives little light.

As mentioned, we would also want to remove dying or dead leaves since they can’t utilize the light. Finally, for the same reason, nip off shoots that grow low on the main stalks.

Topping, apical pruning or pinching out

Apical pruning, also sometimes referred to as “topping” or “pinching out” is one of the most familiar pruning techniques to the great majority of indoor and outdoor cultivators of cannabis. It allows us to control the height of the plants in a simple and effective way, by removing the topmost growing tip.

This approach consists of simply cutting the apex or the growing tip of the plant using scissors, knife, cutting blade, cutter, etc., ideally previously sterilised to avoid infections during the operation, although many gardeners simply use clean fingernails to “pinch out” the tip while others bend it over until it snaps off cleanly. It’s important to remember that if we make clean cuts,  the plants will suffer less stress, and will recover more quickly from the damage with less chance of getting infected.

The growing tip of the plant is where the main growth hormones, or auxins are concentrated. By cutting off the tip, we force the plant to redistribute hormones to the other parts of the plant, slowing down vertical growth and encouraging stronger growth in the lower branches, which will reach upwards to take the place of the apical tip, forming multiple leaders instead of just one and forming a more bush-like plant. This has the advantage of producing many more useful bud sites and an increase in yield. Outdoor growers in particular appreciate this approach as it encourages plants to produce lots of medium-sized flowers rather than one huge bud that could easily fall prey to bud-rot due to its large size and density. Cultivators keeping mother plants also use this technique to stimulate more branching to enable them take lots of healthy cuttings at a time.

 Top or  Fim

Topping or fimming a cannabis plant is a high-stress training (HST) method that works best when the plant is developed and can withstand a drastic change.

For the first topping, a good rule of thumb is to cut the plant above the 5th node—this will give you enough branches on the bottom for the plant to bush out properly.

Super-cropping

Super cropping is the name for a High-Stress Training (HST) technique when you stress the plant by slightly hurting it in a planned way.

As a result, the plant will grow bushier, with more buds, and possibly even higher THC levels! This is the plant’s natural response to protect herself in the wild, in case things go wrong. As the grower, you can take advantage of this technique to get bigger yields and more potent buds!

Now that we’ve looked at the various techniques used to prune cannabis plants.

Are you interested with growing cannabis indoor? What about using a grow tent kits? Best Indoor grow tent kits are bound to be in the entire control; of a grower. In terms of that, you don’t have to fully depend on the affection of nature like outdoor gardening.

They are easy to use and put together. Once you decide how much space you have to run growing, you can initiate the ultimate plan for growing plants.

Just with a little wise effort, it becomes easier for a gardener to use different area for growing purpose. The odor removal mechanism along with purification of air makes it worthy to use for long.

Happy growing!

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