Bottom Branching?

[MagicCannabus]

The entire point of my grow cabinet, and any vertical cab, is to eliminate the lost bud mass at the lower parts of the plant. Top-down lighting is wasteful, and it produces buds that are better at the top and worse at the bottom. My goal is to eliminate that, and so removing the bottom branches would undermine my entire system. So it really depends on what your goals are.

If you must grow with no side lighting, than it's ok to trim out the bud clusters on lower branches, but you should never ever remove fan leaves. The more the plant has the better. Later in flower the plant will cannibalize them for nitrogen and other nutrients. Move fan leaves = more reserve fuel.

 

[UntamedFox]

The entire point of my grow cabinet, and any vertical cab, is to eliminate the lost bud mass at the lower parts of the plant. Top-down lighting is wasteful, and it produces buds that are better at the top and worse at the bottom. My goal is to eliminate that, and so removing the bottom branches would undermine my entire system. So it really depends on what your goals are.

If you must grow with no side lighting, than it's ok to trim out the bud clusters on lower branches, but you should never ever remove fan leaves. The more the plant has the better. Later in flower the plant will cannibalize them for nitrogen and other nutrients. Move fan leaves = more reserve fuel.

very good to know, and as for the definitions of flipping.... hilarious! haha
As you know, MagicCannabus, my closet has those vertical lights, so I'll make sure to not clip the lower branches. I want budding all around since my plant won't be very tall.

 

[MagicCannabus]

Definitely a good way to efficiently use space. You just have to remember that your watts per square foot needs to also be thought of in a vertical sense. I have about 16 square feet of fixture surface area. T8 tubes are not tiny and intense like HID tubes are. So really I have 512W divided by 16 square feet or so, and that gives me about 32W per square foot.

That does not account for overlapping fields, since each individual light has almost unrestricted view of the whole grow space. So really that 32W is plenty, especially given that no bud cluster in my space should ever be more than 6 inches or so from the lamps.

So definitely think 3D on it. It's a lot better to know your actual light output both on your floor space and the surfaces facing the plants than to just think floor space. It's just that on completely top-down grows, the floor space and the space illuminated are the exact same. With that sort of setup, you then can easily figure the dispersion of the light using the inverse square principal. In fact you can photograph it. Just cover the light source in the image so the contrast isn't so extreme. You can just see the increasing dimness of the light as it goes from the top to the bottom. I see tons of growers, even master growers, with whole galleries full of pictures of grows that are ultra bright on the top, and practically pitch black at the bottoms because there's just no room for the light to get through.