The cold, dry barren wasteland that is my sprouting area-
I don’t use special lighting or a heat mat because with autos, nature didn’t provide many special conditions, which helped make ruderalis what it is. Autos were kind of born out of miserable conditions and are tougher than they get credit for.
My autos are born into real conditions, because the clock is ticking from the minute they break ground. They don’t care what day I start counting, they already started.
I’ve tried in the past few years to dispel some rumors and some of my own beliefs about them as well.
Here’s some of what I’ve found-
It’s fairly bright where they are born (22-23k lux) and this has never hurt a single plant. During training the lux sits around 33-35k.
I don’t need to start them in their final container. If I’m halfway decent at transplanting, they’ll barely notice for longer than half a day.
For about 8/10 autos, topping within 36 hours of seeing a pistil gets me the best results in training.
They can live on almost nothing (no nutes) for the for the first 2 weeks, and some even prefer that. I like a few drops of superthrive and tap water.
Shock seems absolutely necessary to their prolific veg growth, rather than something to avoid as many seem to ponder.
I get great results watering (but never over watering) pretty much every day.
Because of the lighting and other factors, there will always be a calcium/mag deficiency if I don’t compensate. There will always be gnats.
As much as I appreciate quadline, hexline gets me consistently good sized buds without being so big I face fungus gnat/rot/pm issues. Also a better chance at secondary branching during training. OctoLine can tend to favor the top 2 branches more and hasn’t shown any advantages. Hex seems like my jam
Indoors I like the 3g and outdoors 5/7g containers.
July and August are really the only months where the sunlight here fully supports their outside growth but if I get them nice and beefy inside first, they jump into the sun no problem and finish strong and colorful due to the temp changes.
Been lucky to have very few herms (none of my own seeds hermed) from the sometimes extreme weather and light changes.
My Wookiees is practically made for this kind of transition and seems to resist problems well.
I have quite a few new crosses getting ready to try early outside growth this month.