When I first started growing last year I used photoperiod seeds as thats what was gifted to me.My gut instinct is to say, "No, of course not." But I grew an auto-flowering plant last year, and it had just started flowering "full on" when I knocked it off the counter and broke it off just above... not the cotlydons, but the very first pair of leaves above those. I threw it away, then someone talked me into digging it out of the trash and trying to repair it. That failed, and I was going to throw it away again, but those two leaves were still green - so, out of curiosity, I decided to ignore it and see how long it would take to die.
It grew up, flowered, and got harvested, lol. Did the unintentional abuse hurt the yield? Who knows. If I remember correctly, it yielded 12.6 grams. But it spent most of its life in a 18-ounce Solo cup, until (IIRC) 20 days before harvest, when I upgraded its root space to a massively huge...
2-liter Mountain Dew bottle . And I also harvested it just a wee bit early, when my oldest friend stopped by one evening and mentioned that he'd just learned he had cancer and I felt the need to cheer him up by handing him a poke of (freshly harvested) bud.
And I have been told many times that, once an auto-flowering cannabis plant reaches its full flowering stride, that the plant isn't going to get any bigger. That one did - it might have been three inches tall after the... accident.
As AKGramma stated:
Even assuming that a plant is capable of revegging, I would assume that it needs to have a ready supply of nitrogen (/calcium/etc.). Therefore, if I was going to attempt such an experiment, I'd feed it well with a nutrient ratio tailored for this purpose, a couple of days before I tried to initiate the regrowth (and I'd have prepared things by making sure that the light schedule was only at 12:12 for at least ten days prior to doing so, and then switch to either constant light or 20:4). And I would leave as much "greenery" as possible on the plant when I cut the buds off of it https://420.com/. I couldn't even begin to guess whether it would be better to leave some buds or to remove all of them. I know that I see more roses when I remove the ones that are already there, and the same seems to hold true for my peppers. But I'm trying to get more flowers/fruit, whereas you're trying to reveg the plant.
Whatever you decide... And, again, if it was me doing the expriment (as in all things, YMMV, lol), I'd probably not wait too long to harvest those buds before attempting the reveg.
I live in a state where I'm allowed to grow 4 plants for home use.
I smoke about 1/8 a week and mainly consume my own supply.
If I grow 4 autoflower plants (assuming I do a decent job) what kind of yields should I realistically expect as a noob to autoflowers? I basically don't want to put myself in a situation where I have a bad harvest from the autos, and not enough to last me 5 months till new photoperiod plants are ready.
Also, beyond not needing to switch the light schedule, are there any other big differences / considerations in growing autos vs photoperiod plants?