Cannabis Plant Pruning & Defoliation: Maximize your Buds!

By Central Ave

October 10, 2025

Cannabis 101

Cannabis Plant Pruning and Defoliation

At Central Harvest in Ayer, Massachusetts, precision and care are at the heart of every cultivation step. In this video, our Director of Cultivation, Dave, walks through one of the most important techniques in small-batch growing — pruning and defoliation. By strategically trimming lower leaves and branches, our team helps each plant focus its energy where it matters most: producing dense, high-quality buds.

Known as the “lollipopping” technique, this method targets the top 30–40% of the cannabis canopy, improving airflow, light penetration, and overall consistency across each harvest. In this behind-the-scenes look, Dave explains when and why we defoliate (around day 14 of the flower cycle), how to remove unnecessary growth, and what to avoid to prevent airy buds.

At Central Harvest, we believe that small, intentional actions lead to big results. Our hands-on approach to pruning and defoliation reflects our commitment to crafting cleaner, more flavorful cannabis — one plant at a time.

Watch the full video to see how our team puts this technique into practice and learn tips you can use to improve your own grow.

Full Transcript - Cannabis Plant Pruning & Defoliation: Maximize your Buds!

Hey guys my name is Dave I’m the director of cultivation at Central Harvest here in Ayer Mass and I just wanted to give you guys a quick look into how we do our pruning and defoliation in our flower
rooms.
 
So we’re working on tickle burger right here which is almost 14 days into its flower cycle.
 
So we try to limit our defoliation events in the flower room to really just once.We like to just leave them alone as much as we can and do a lot of our training in the vegetative room but they do need a little bit of what we like to call lollipopping in the flower rooms and that really helps us to prevent you know the really thin buds that aren’t as high quality they aren’t as dense and it really keeps the end result consistent in all the buds.
 
So they look a lot like this before we’ve touched them and then at about 14 days or so that’s usually when we do that lollipopping defoliation event and once we prune them up here they won’t need to be touched again until we harvest them.

So what we’re really trying to do here is we’re just trying to lift the plants essentially and we’re really trying to focus all of the energy into kind of the top 30 or 40% of the plants and where you’re kind of really trying to remove the bottom branches kind of this thinner spindly stuff as I like to call it where if that was left on the plant it’s really they’re not going to develop into the same size the same quality as these plants that are closer to the lights and up top that’s why we call it lollipopping is because that’s essentially what we’re doing we’re trying to strip the lower half of the plants and we’re trying to really focus on the upper half of the plants.

 
so let me show you quickly on this plant what that’s going to look like there is some leaf removal but it’s mostly cutting and we just come in and I just take a lot of these lower branches out I check before I cut to see how high they’re reaching up into the canopy and we go from there and that is pretty close to a finished plant right there.
 
So we’ve taken about 40% off that lower canopy off this will really help increase air flow underneath the plants too so they’ve got air flow up above and below whereas if you leave a lot of these lower branches it stays pretty congested and stagnant underneath.

But that’s usually about as far as we take it so it’s it’s usually kind of something pretty close to a 50/50 scenario where the bottom 50% is relatively bare and the top 50% where we’re really going to be trying to focus all that flowering energy remains completely intact so that’s pretty much all we do for defoliations in the flower rooms

 
I hope you guys enjoyed that thanks so much for watching see you next time

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