The age of autoflowers has arrived. Once thought to be inferior to traditional photoperiod strains, advancements in cannabis breeding have led to this type of seeds retaining many of the same qualities as their photoperiod counterparts. There is, of course, one main difference: autoflowers cannabis goes into flower regardless of light cycles.
This distinct trait can offer many advantages to growers, including adding additional harvests for those growing full-season outdoor crops. Because the plants are often smaller than traditional cannabis plants, autoflowers also offer a viable growing option for people with limited space. More than half the world’s population lives in dense urban areas, so autoflowers are a way to bring pot to the populace.
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“They’re definitely not your granddad’s autos anymore,” says Benjamin Lind, co-founder and chief science officer at Humboldt Seed Company. “In the past five to seven years, we’ve seen this really steady climb in the overall quality and potency in autoflowers.”
Autoflowers finish quickly; the whole process from seed to ripened bud is completed in eight to 12 weeks. They are a good option for newer growers as most autoflowers are also feminized seeds, which means you don’t have to determine whether your plant is male or female. The ability to harvest flowering plants before the rainy season arrives in fall offers another added benefit.
“One of the misconceptions of autos is that they have to be somehow inferior to autoflower plants,” Humboldt Seed Company’s founder and CEO Nathaniel Pennington says. “What we’ve learned over the years, doing a number of different strains a number of different times, is that it really is possible to just essentially only alter that one trait and retain all the qualities of whatever photoperiod strain you’re moving over to doing autoflower.”
That means autos can retain the terpene profile, structure, potency, and bud density of their photoperiod equivalents.
“A Hella Jelly photo looks just like a Hella Jelly auto,” Lind says of examining the buds side-by-side. “The Pepsi/Coke challenge got me like three years ago, and that’s when they really just showed how far they’d come.”
“Size matters not…”
Not everyone has the space to grow cannabis into massive trees. Sometimes, it’s not even space constraints that are the concern but the necessity to keep cannabis plants undetected by unfriendly neighbors or law enforcement. In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Master Yoda tells Luke Skywalker, “Size matters not,” wisdom that can be applied to autoflowering cannabis.
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Lind explains that autoflowers are sensitive creatures that grow into the space that the plant perceives it has and then flowers from there. That means if it’s in a small 1-inch grow tray for too long, growers could end up with a flowering cannabis plant that’s 8 inches tall. Whereas, if the autoflower seed is placed in a 10-gallon pot, the same seed stock could produce a specimen that stretches to 6 feet tall.
“[Autoflowers] don’t like their roots to be overcrowded or overly disturbed,” Lind says, adding, “Your planting density can affect your flowering timing.”
In urban apartments, the smaller size of cannabis plants grown from autoflower seeds versus photoperiod seeds can be transformed from a negative attribute into an advantage.
“You can put them in a small pot on your windowsill or on your balcony, something that’s manageable that’s not going to grow into a 10-foot tree that you’re going to have trouble hiding from your neighbors,” Lind says.
Pennington adds that autoflowers are also not affected by light pollution from a neighbor’s porch light in close quarters.
“An auto is just going to kind of ignore that and basically just finish in two and a half, three months, no matter what,” he says.
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Lind says autos also offer predictability, as they allow growers to forecast how many seeds they can plant and how many plants they can harvest within a dependable rhythm.
“The ability to forecast as a grower is so beneficial just for dry room space or irrigation schedules,” Lind says. “There’s not a whole lot of unknown when it comes to the plant’s life cycle.”
Pennington adds that replacing a light deprivation set-up with autoflowers can also mean less plastic and expended effort on the grower’s part.
Autoflower origins
Autoflowers bloom outside of the 12:12-hour cycle of light and darkness of most types of photoperiod plants because they are descended from a type of cannabis that stands alongside the more commonly known species of indica and sativa, ruderalis. Cannabis ruderalis originates from central and eastern Europe—think Siberia and Russia—where the outdoor growing season is shorter than in places closer to the equator due to a high latitude.
Cannabis cultivation expert Ed Rosenthal tells me that autoflowering cannabis first emerged through the seed bank that started it all, The Seed Bank of Holland—often shortened to simply The Seed Bank—founded by Nevil Schoenmakers. The Seed Bank was established in the Netherlands in 1984, and Schoenmakers gathered many distinct types of wild cannabis in order to breed them together, creating the world’s first commercial cannabis hybrids.
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Rosenthal explains that Schoenmakers picked up ruderalis seeds from a Russian variety when he traveled to Romania.
“They were very short flowering,” Rosenthal says, adding that the quality of the ruderalis strain was not great. “You didn’t really get high from it; you got more of a headache.”
In an article published in the November 1987 edition of High Times, Rosenthal writes that The Seed Bank crossed ruderalis with indica. Thus, “they were able to breed the favorable start-flowering characteristic into a relatively pure indica.”
Some of the first types of ruderalis-based autoflowers to emerge outside of The Seed Bank were Mighty Mite and Lowryder, Rosenthal says, adding that, up until about 2010, autoflowers were all very small and left people “genuinely dissatisfied.”
Around a decade ago, Humboldt Seed Company began working with genetics close to those that might be found growing in the wild in Siberia. It has since refined the quality of autoflowering cannabis by breeding it through several generations.
To bring viable autoflower seeds to market, Humboldt Seed Company goes through five generations of each strain. As more photoperiod strains were converted into autoflower versions, Lind explains that they have even less of the negative “baggage” associated with ruderalis, such as low THC.
While once considered inferior cannabis due to its small size and low percentage of THC, Lind and Pennington are both convinced autoflower cannabis can now stand up to the quality of photoperiod cannabis.
“If you find something that you really, really love and you want to make it into an auto, it’s going to add a little bit of extra time,” Pennington says. “But there’s no baggage that always comes along with autoflower. I think a lot of people assume that there is.”
*This article was submitted by a guest contributor. The author is solely responsible for the content.