Autoflowering Seeds

One of the biggest advantages growing cannabis indoors has over outdoor growing is, of course, in the grower’s ability to produce more than just one crop in a single year. When grown outdoors, cannabis strains have to adhere to the laws of nature, and there’s very little a grower can do to avoid it. There’s a good reason outdoor growing isn’t the preferred method for commercial growing as it’s simply not possible to create as much buds on the limited amount of space as it’s possible to do with indoor growing a couple of harvests a year. And while autoflowering doesn’t level out the playing field, it certainly does make things more interesting. Autoflowering is a phenomenon where a plant doesn’t require a cue to know when to start producing flowers. In nature, the length of the daylight cycle tells the plant when it’s time to start flowering in order to avoid going into flowering too late, in the autumn. With autoflowering plants, these cues are not needed – the plant will start to flower in a set amount of time even if it’s kept under lights for 24 hours a day. When translated into cannabis growing, this means that autoflowering strains, when grown outside, can produce two harvests in the same time a non-autoflowering strain would take to produce one. Autoflowering cannabis strains are usually shorter, and they start flowering after 3 or 4 weeks, and are ready for harvesting after 9 to 11 weeks.

• Autoflowering strains flower at a set time regardless of the light cycle.
• They are generally shorter, and finish early.
• They are capable of producing good yields, twice a year.

Autoflowering strains are a bit of a mystery because no one can tell with certainty what their origins are. What is known is that Lowryder was the first autoflowering strain available on the market, and that beside the fact that it was very convenient for stealth growing and had the advantages an autoflowering plant carries by default, it was a huge disappointment at first because it didn’t induce that great of a high. Lowryder’s parent was speculated to be a Mexican strain which contained genetics from Cannabis ruderalis, the northernmost cannabis landrace strain which originates from Russia and has the autoflowering ability. But the mystery follows autoflowering strains even today, because it might be hard to find a seed producer that will openly state the genetic lineage of his autoflowering strains. It’s easy to speculate that the original Lowryder is behind all of these strains, but how much that’s true is not known at the moment.