The long-awaited time for all outdoor growers to grow marijuana has come, outside the cramped walls – spring! And she brings us new experiences, great opportunities and makes us make plans, at least for the season that has begun …
In the event that you are limited in time and cannot wait from 6 to 8 months for the product of your grower’s attempts, autoflowering marijuana strains are your best friend!
And now we will tell you why this is so!
It is worth starting with the fact that autoflowering marijuana varieties are, first of all, more early maturing specially bred cannabis varieties, in which, often, the ripening of cones occurs in 1.5-4 months – these are the approximate dates when you can get a ready-made harvest and do it. drying and curing. It is the early maturity that distinguishes them from photoperiodic varieties of marijuana in which a longer period of both growth and flowering is genetically laid. But a lot also depends on genetics – so pay attention to the types of cannabis that you are preparing to grow, it will be pure sativa (ripens for a long time, obviously not for the post-Soviet space, but for equatorial and close latitudes), indica (ripens faster) or hybrid ratio of sativa / indica / ruderalis.
Also, autoflowers are compact (plant height from 50 cm to 130 cm) and secrecy, in contrast to photoperiod varieties, which can reach over 2 meters in height and more. We will omit the yield, in the criteria for choosing a variety, since a lot depends on the experience in growing the grower and his knowledge of this difficult matter.
It is undesirable to transplant autoflowering marijuana varieties, but if you do decide to do this, here are some tips for you. Most likely, you could have prepared marijuana sprouts in advance for planting in open ground by germinating them in small cups of plastic or peat tablets until the root system almost completely occupies the entire selected soil. And if these manipulations with the plant were successful, then it is time to transplant autoflowers to the street. There is nothing complicated about that! The most important thing is to take good care of the root system and not damage it, otherwise there is a chance that the plant may die.
Particular attention should be paid to the moment when to transplant hemp – it is enough to wait for the third internodes (third row of leaves), which occurs approximately in the second or third week of the seedling’s life, and after that it’s time to transplant your plant into the ground.
When the autoflowering transplant is successful and the plant has taken root in a new place for it, you should make sure that your cannabis gets enough water, not to mention nutrients. And here there may be several solutions to this important moment in the life of a plant – to arrange drip irrigation or to personally water the plant. And it is drip irrigation that will suit you in the event that it is not possible to regularly visit your plantation. To do this, you need to take a 5-6 liter eggplant, dig it near the plant, make several holes in the dug part of the bottle, which will allow the plant to be without watering for a certain period of time.
It should be borne in mind that hot temperatures and windy weather lead to more intense evaporation of moisture. But waterlogging of the soil is also bad for the plant and the next watering should be done when 3 cm of the soil is completely dry. Watering your cannabis in the early hours is a big plus so that it gets enough water throughout the day. The approximate amount of water consumed by one 1.5 m plant is about 4 liters.
As mentioned above, after 2-3 weeks from the moment of emergence, autoflowering vegetation ends, cannabis enters the flowering phase and ripens for 6-7 weeks. And it’s best to start growing your cannabis seeds from mid-May to mid-June. That way, your plants will get the most sunlight, and your autoflowers will have to bloom just when the days are getting shorter – which will be the signal for the flowering phase of your autoflowering strain.
