Questions Defoliating Autos, interesting question?

Posted by: @skinnie_p

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Once you see it's starting to flower, if you do a good defoliation will it force the plant to grow any more?

Its a good question man! It will stretch the same as photos do when they are in the regenerative stage of growth between the veg and flower. It wont make more leaves and branches, it'll just stretch the plant and increase internodal space, which you don't really want. So I wouldn't do it mate, but its up to you. If you do do it, make sure you start a a diary so other can see how it goes too

So in no means am I a professional, but I play one in my flower room 😛

I've grown autos probably 20 times maybe, and I've done everything from leaving them alone to bonsai.

Autos in my opinion are quite finicky usually, in my opinion it depends on the strain, so i tend to let them do their thing.

They go from small little guys to big pretty quick and it is their own constant stretch when they hit that flower mode. Autos usually don't have much for foliage like a photo either, so I tend not to defol till buds are full rip as they need all the solar panels they have.

One thing I do is to slowly train them to widen out. I've topped them before, but that you need to do well before it gets to flower.

Also, as for the "screwed up" part you're thinking, the only thing I've ever seen in the beginning is not giving it enough nutes or light or maybe you did something like train it too hard ( break a branch ) or something of the sort, which usually stunts them some and at that point you are at the mercy of the plant, you have no time to "fix it" accept to just get back on track with lights and nutes.

My suggestion is to just make sure the plant is open enough to get light to as much of the plant as you can and let her run! 😎 

Another thing I've seen people talk about is running half nutes or less nutes on autos, and I've not noticed any difference really, so I run them WIDE open just like my photos, just gotta make sure you have a good size pot for them, the bigger the better!

Keep up the great work and show us how she turns out 😍 

@macky thanks for the reply mate. My high brain was convinced I cracked the code, but yes this makes a little more sense 😂 I’m putting together notes and pics/videos for a diary and YT video, might post em soon. Cheers

@johncarlson21 hey man, appreciate the info and reply. I grew a double grape from Mephisto in living soil, and it hasn’t grown more than 8 inches tall. I’m pretty sure it was stunted from a combination of a bad solo cup transplant and too high of light intensity. 

I love autos though, trying to get the balance just right so I can grow a monster like I see from others on here. Thanks again my friend, cheers

So I got 3 autos going now. 1 I'm only defoliating. 1 is topped and defoliated and the 3rd is mainlined and defoliated, out of the 3 she is the smallest but all of them are budding and look healthy.

@skinnie_p I’m not sure if I mentioned or not but I usually run my light at 75% or less for my autos when they are small, usually 50%

as for the solo cup transplant, could be if ya got kinda root bound, I usually transplant autos quick. But really my bonsai did great and that couldn’t have been more than 3-4 solo cups worth of ProMix

keep at it man! You’ll get’er figured out 😎 

it could have just been a bad plant also 🤷‍♂️ that happens. I’ve thrown many that didn’t move along like they should.