Join the conversation
modern autos are genuinely worth a second look
ran my third back-to-back cycle of Banana Blaze in the 3x3 and pulled 3.4 oz off a single plant in 77 days from seed. not a brag, just saying this stuff is real now. a few years ago that number would've been fantasy for an auto. the genetics have caught up in a serious way.
the potency thing used to be the knock and honestly i get why. older autoflower genetics had a ceiling. what i'm growing now hits harder than a lot of the photo cuts i ran years ago. my dispensary-going friends stop asking what strain it is and just ask for more, lol.
timeline is where autos still do something pretty unique though. 70 to 85 days and you're done. for anyone running a small space and wanting multiple harvests a year that math just works really well. doesn't matter if your main thing is photos, having a fast option in rotation is never a bad call.
if you haven't touched autoflower genetics in a few years it might be worth revisiting. the seed banks have put real work into these lines. grab something with a solid reputation, give it a proper run with good light and decent soil, and see what it does. you might be surprised where they're sitting now.
6 Comments
Yield and potency, fair enough, those have both come a long way and i won't argue it. Where i still find myself frustrated with most auto lines though is the terp profile. Not all of them, but a lot. You get decent numbers on the jar and then you crack it open and it's just... fine. Kinda sweet, kinda earthy, nothing that makes you stop and actually smell it again.
Banana Blaze is actually one of the better ones for flavor which is probably why you picked it. That banana and vanilla thing it does is genuine, not just marketing. But i've run maybe a dozen other popular auto lines chasing that same quality of nose and most of them just don't have it. The speed was dialed in before the terp complexity was.
My take is the genetics are there now in terms of structure and yield, you're right about that. The cure matters even more with autos in my experience because you don't have as much raw material to work with in terms of scent. A rushed cure will flatten whatever terps are there. Slow it down, 60 plus days minimum if you want the profile to open up.
The cure point is solid but 60 days minimum feels like it's becoming its own doctrine. I've pulled excellent terp expression at 30-35 days with good environmental control, and I've also ruined a perfectly decent batch by going long in conditions that weren't dialed in. Time is a tool, not a target.
Curious what your RH looks like during those 30-35 day cures, because that's where i've seen the most variance in my own jars. I ran two batches side by side last winter, same strain, same harvest day, and the one I pulled at 32 days was noticeably flatter on the nose even though the environment was "good." Not saying your results aren't real, just that I've had a hard time replicating the short cure consistently.
The cure point is real but i'd push it one step earlier -- the living soil side of things matters just as much for terp expression as anything that happens post-harvest. Most of the flat-smelling auto runs i've seen or heard about were grown in a hot synthetic program or a coco setup where the plant was just eating salts. Nothing wrong with that approach, but the microbial activity in a properly built living soil does something to secondary metabolite production that's hard to replicate. The fungi and bacteria are essentially in conversation with the plant roots, and that relationship influences terpene synthesis at a pretty fundamental level.
When I switched my 4x4 over to a full living soil build about three years ago, the first thing I noticed wasn't yield. It was smell. More complex, more layered, more of that "stop and sniff again" quality the previous reply was describing. Autos included.
So if you're chasing better terp profiles on fast genetics, it might not be a genetics ceiling at all. Could be worth looking at what the roots are actually living in.
living soil doing something for terps, yeah i believe it. but id be careful pinning flat smell entirely on the grow medium, because ive had some genuinely dull-smelling runs in my best living soil beds and some surprisingly complex harvests out of straight perlite and a basic feed schedule. genetics and pheno variation still account for a lot more variance than people want to give credit for.
genetics doing the heavy lifting makes sense to me, i've had the same pheno smell totally different run to run with identical inputs. but i'd say medium isn't nothing either, more like a multiplier on whatever the plant was already capable of expressing.
More in Cannabis Seeds & Strains
- what classic strain still holds up for you
- Small pheno hunt, week 2 veg, curious what you all think
- Ordering seeds
- tired of autos getting disrespected on every thread
- Popped a full pack, 6 phenos, week 2 veg update
- Pheno hunting a pack of Zkittlez, week 2 veg differences
- Landrace strains — are they worth growing?
- Breeding your own strain — beginner genetics guide