Hey there Archie
By annual, i mean, it lives for a year or less.
What really interests me, is the potential for an auto flowering plant
to have more longevity than that. ie. for it to survive multiple summers and multiple winters.
It seems to me that this must be theoretically possible,
since i has one parent that has 'multi-year' longevity.
But i guess that most of us don't know whether autos are multi-annual or not
because we harvest them in their prime. We need to harvest them less severely
and allow them to survive the harvest and then wait and watch to see what happens
in the months and years head. Because:
(a) Perhaps ... some autos are perpetually flowering
(eg: give sufficient light and warmth and nutrients, maybe they just go on and on flowering)
(b) If not perpetually flowering, perhaps these plants, go into a kind of vegetative
dormancy, until the next year, during which time, they build up more and more root
stock and then... voila... a much bigger yield in year [HASHTAG]#2[/HASHTAG] then in year#1, and then
perhaps a bigger yield in year [HASHTAG]#3[/HASHTAG] than in year [HASHTAG]#2[/HASHTAG] .. and so on.
So it seems to me that those are two great reasons to be gentle during
harvest time and to study your girls carefully during the subsequent weeks,
months and years.
There's also potential here for a Low Stress approach to harvesting. It must be stressful
for the plant to have all it's flowers cut off in one go. Remember it _is_ possible to
do LST on autos. Perhaps by developing a multi-cola canopy, we can then conduct
a harvest over 4 weeks, pruning small quantities of bud every 3 or 4 days. Perhaps
doing a low stress harvest, encourages the plant to generate new bud and simply
keep going with the flowering.
These are interesting perspectives, no ?
Have a nice day, and be happy
cryptolab
Unless you get something like 50% more bud by taking 4 weeks to harvest I reckon it would be more productive to be 4 weeks into your next grow.