Classic said:
At the risk of sounding like the AFM, which is not my intention...
If you want to harvest something in the near future and don't have an indoor grow room, autos are the only choice right now. I wouldn't want to wait until Spring to even get started.
I chose autos for my first grow because of the speed. I could experience everything from germination to harvest in 7 to 8 weeks. It was similar to taking a college course in summer school instead of the longer term fall semester.
I don't doubt the advice that 12/12s are superior in many ways. I currently have three in full bloom outdoors. They are doing quite well and part of the reason for that is the experience I gained earlier this year with autos.
I agree with that.....mostly.
Autos are a good fit for outdoors late in the season....but don't expect much of a yield.
Autos are a good fit for indoor growers who can't for whatever reason provide an uninterrupted 12 hour dark period.
Now some of the downside to autos....and this comes from my first hand experience growing them. Which I did almost exclusively when I first started....hell I was at the front of the parade holding the flag.
until I understood autos short comings.
You can't clone a true auto flower strain. This sucks on two levels:
First off it gets expensive buying auto beans and secondly if you get a good auto pheno you can't hold on to it.
Autos tend to vary in size and yield...you can get a wide variety in a pack of auto beans and I almost always got stuck with a cpl runts along with one or two okay phenos. And like I just mentioned it is not like you can clone the okay ones. Nothing sucks more then plunking down a bunch of cash for auto beans and then getting a handful of autos that yield an ounce a plant if lucky.
Potency- it just isn't there in most auto strains. Maybe it has someone to do with the fact that the longer a plant vegs and the older it is the more THC it is able to produce? But with autos you get about a 18-21 day veg before it shows sex and starts flowering. Not a lot of time to mature and grow.
Another downside is electricity usage for autos. If you are growing them indoors and want the best yields possible you will run your HPS light 18/6 min and more like 20-4, 22-2 or 24-0. Meanwhile the guy running 12/12 dankage can run his lights 12/12 and it will cost him half as much for better weed that can be cloned.
Finally we get to the reason most say they run autos....SPEED.
Well on closer inspection we can see that you can almost crop out as quickly with a 12/12 strain ran from clone.
2 weeks to root and veg the 12/12 strain from clone, 49-53 days of flower and we are looking at 63-67 days to harvest.
and unlike an autos B smoke you can be puffing on A+ Dank.
This is just my opinion from my experiences. Please no death threats from the AFM after 6pm Eastern time.