Pruning Cannabis Plants — Why, How, and When | Grove Bags (2024)

Knowing how to trim and prune the cannabis leaf is essential for grow room success. The practice leads to higher yields, better flavor, and a smoother toke; it also helps keep pests and diseases at bay, and ensures your plants live a long and healthy life from seed to sale.

There are a few easy techniques to tuck in your back pocket when it comes to ensuring your plants are pruned and primed for consumption. Just keep in mind that these tips and tricks vary slightly depending on what stage of growth your plants are in.

Knowing how to prune cannabis means knowing that it depends on the conditions they’re grown in—and that’s why it’s so important to study your crop closely. However, you can generally utilize this checklist for success:

The Plant Pruning Checklist: How to Clip a Weed Plant

1. Prune and defoliate your cannabis plant a little bit at a time, ensuring a clean cut. This will help you avoid over-stressing your plants.
2. Make sure to trim off the highest priority leaves and bud sites first. Then, wait a week or two before you continue pruning.
3. You can repeat this step around three or four times, stopping there to avoid over-stress or potential damage down the line.

Pruning marijuana for outdoor growers

With uncontrolled airflow and sunlight, outdoor grow conditions are often unpredictable. That’s why pruning the lower branches of the plant can make a world of difference in the health of an outdoor crop.

These plants rely on the natural breeze and the different light angles provided by the sun as it moves across the sky each day. It is important for growers to optimize a crop’s exposure to the elements without stripping it of its ability to photosynthesize.

Dealing with death

Knowing how to prune cannabis plants at the first sign of a pest or sickness can save cultivators from massive crop loss.

Just like any plant, singular leaves can die or become ill during the growth process, and it is important to remove those leaves and allow the plant to focus its limited energy on healthy growth. This is very important for outdoor growing, but the same conditions can sometimes occur in indoor crops.

If your leaves wilt or turn yellow and brown, their health is declining. Remove them as soon as possible because damaged leaves suck energy from other parts of the plant, diverting nutrients from the bud sites.

Yup, it really is as simple as that—with a few nuances to keep in mind and pay attention to while you work.

When pruning, remember:

Whether you are removing the fan leaves of cannabis during the vegetative or flowering stages, make sure not to remove too many leaves at one time. Defoliating is a sensitive process, and if it is not done properly, the removal of the leaves can shock the plant, trigger early flowering, and produce a less impressive yield. Most cultivators prioritize the removal of yellowing or wilting leaves first to optimize the health of a plant.

The process should be done in stages and each big removal session should be conducted at least one week apart. Prior to the flowering stage, growers often remove around half of a plant’s fan leaves to encourage bud production. Right before it is time to harvest the buds, you can remove most of the fan leaves from the plant. However, it is important to allow a few days for the plant to recover before harvesting.

There are three types of popular trimming techniques in cannabis cultivation: topping, fimming, and lollipop.

Topping removes a growing point by pruning directly above a node.

Fimming is carried out to increase yield by cutting through the small leaves at a growing point, leaving about 30 percent of the growing point intact.

Finally, lollipop refers to the shape the plants grow after applying the lollipop technique, with all the growth focused at the top of the plant and bare stalks at the bottom.