Pros & Cons of feminized auto-flowering seeds

 

Indoor cultivation has been gaining popularity due to how easy it is to create a close to perfect environment where plants will have all the conditions present for massive and potent yield. 

Besides, thanks to the auto-flowers, the process brings a lot of fun as well! There is nothing like watching how a tiny seed turns into a bunch of high quality weed in just 2 months.

In many other articles of this blog I emphasized that feminized auto-flowers are the best choice in terms of efforts to result ratio. It is time to dive a bit deeper and discuss what exactly makes them so good.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE FEMINIZED SEEDS?

To begin with, I will shed some light on how feminized seeds were created. We aren’t botanist breeders, but some extra knowledge about your hobby always comes in handy. At least you can always educate your friends a bit whilst sharing a home-made joint.

Feminized seeds have been precisely selected over a long period of time in order to get rid of the male chromosomes in order to get rid of the male plants. Those kinds of seeds became the most common among indoor growers for the simple fact that female plants produce more smokable buds and also have higher concentration of THC and CBD. That is what Steven Covey would call a win-win, isn’t it?

 

On top of that, feminized seeds require less attention during the growth cycle. With classic seeds you would need to constantly keep an eye on male plants, which at some point have to be removed. Otherwise they will pollinate the female plants and essentially ruin your yield.

AUTO-FLOWER SEEDS

Infinite gratitude to the breeders, by creating auto-flowers they essentially made indoor growing widely available. Autoflowering strains are created by crossbreeding indica or sativa plants with ruderalis. 

Ruderalis is a wild subtype of cannabis that grows in regions where the summer is very short but features many hours of daylight (e.g. Northern Europe or Siberia). These plants have evolved to not rely on daylight hours to flower, instead flowering according to age. 

On its own Ruderalis isn’t really useful, its buds won’t produce a high, and the plants are small with low yields. However, breeders discovered that they could crossbreed high-quality indica and sativa strains with ruderalis to make them autoflowering. This has revolutionized cannabis cultivation by mixing the best qualities of all the cannabis subspecies.

PROS OF AUTO-FLOWER SEEDS

1. These seeds produce smaller plants with fewer maintenance requirements, this makes them suitable for areas with not ideal growing conditions or limited growing space.

 

1. Auto-flower Seeds also produce plants that can withstand fluctuations in temperatures and still grow fast enough. 

1. The seeds are very resilient. They can resist pests, mold, and frost since they can be grown almost anywhere all year long given that temperatures aren’t  too low, this guarantees reliability regardless of the prevailing weather conditions.

1. Short life cycle and no need to shift the light schedules. Regardless of the external conditions, it will take a maximum of 10 weeks to reach the harvest. It sort of like an automatic gear in the car, just plug and play

And what is the price to pay for all this convenience? Well, it isn’t too big. The truth is that the potential yield of auto-flowers is always limited, a decent strain with a perfect environment around typically gives 70-100 grams indoors. 

 

An average-sized harvested auto-flower (60g)

 

Which is still a lot, given how quick the cycle is. On the other hand, for non auto-flowers the sky is the limit. They only start blooming once you change the light schedule. 

Hence it is possible to keep them in the vegetative stage as long as you want. That way some plants grow up to 2 meters long and later produce massive yields. However, the average home grower has neither need for that, nor the space and equipment.