What Indoor Climate Works Best for Auto-flowering Cannabis Plants?

When growing autoflowering cannabis plants, it is vital to consider every measurable condition inside your garden carefully. As with any cannabis plant, both yields and THC content will be affected by the environment provided for your plants.

Temperature, humidity, light schedule, and C02 saturation are some of the most crucial factors that create your garden’s climate.

Whether you’re growing traditional photoperiod seeds or a fast-growing auto-flowering cannabis strain, the best quality cannabis with the most THC and CBD, as well as trichome density will always come from well-moderated environments.

Indoor growers face different challenges from outdoor growers, making the necessary conditions for each kind of marijuana plant to vary considerably.

In this article, we will focus on the optimal environment for growing auto-flowering cannabis plants indoors.

What are Auto-flowering Cannabis Seeds?

Autoflower cannabis seeds are the less fussy, hardier varieties of cannabis that have been cultivated to allow anyone to grow high-quality marijuana in any kind of grow space.

Autoflower plants have a shorter germination period, meaning fewer hours of light, and therefore a shorter vegetative stage and an explosive flowering stage.

Lowryder is a popular brand of auto-flowering genetics available in a wide variety of strains. Sour Diesel, many varieties of skunk, high CBD and high THC strains, spanning from indica-dominant to full sativa strains.

These small plants produce plenty of trichomes, THC, and enough vegetative growth to produce a high yield without worrying about the growing season, or whether you live in colder climates.

What Makes Auto-flowers Unique?

Autoflower strains are crossed by breeding cannabis ruderalis plants (which are the wild-found strains indigenous to many continents), hardy plants long used by outdoor growers.

Autoflowering seeds are effectively miniature versions of their photoperiod strain cousins that flower more quickly and automatically enter their flowering phase without growers needing to change the light cycle or wait for the growing season to get late enough to provide sufficient hours of darkness.

Kush and other indicia-dominant auto-flowering plants will perform better outside than sativa-dominant strains since sativas naturally prefer warmer temperatures. Indica strains typically hail from cold climates with longer hours of darkness while ruderalis plants are indigenous to every continent except Antarctica.

These cannabis plants can be ready to harvest in 10 weeks or less following germination.

Why New Growers Love Auto-flowering Plants

While you cannot clone them, auto-flower plants are almost always feminized, which means you’ll have a high-THC or high-CBD plant ready in weeks without low-stress training. Autoflowers allow new growers to experiment with notoriously tall sativa strains in a smaller plant.

Autoflowering cannabis plants have short light cycles; predictable life cycles are forgiving to first-time and novice cannabis growers still finding the setup that works best for them.

Autoflowering cannabis seeds are beneficial for growers who have limited access to the necessary space, robust lighting equipment, and elaborate nutrient regimens needed for a more extensive photoperiod grow operation.

Warm Up to Your Plants

Generally, most strains of auto-flowering cannabis prefer warm climates when growing indoors. A range between 27-30 C or (80-85 F) usually allows the air to be warm enough to provide the plant’s desired temperature range while also holding the moisture needed for your cannabis plant’s desired humidity.

If you’re using grow lights specific to cannabis plant cultivation, they are likely able to generate enough heat to keep your cannabis crop warm and happy. Depending on the ventilation and size of your room, you may have to work for a colder climate if you have too many lights creating too much heat. LED bulbs are also useful in providing the hours of light needed without adding significant heat.

Warm conditions are desirable, but it’s important to have a thermometer that accurately reads your garden’s temperature and humidity. Doing so will allow you to keep the plants within a healthy range of temperature and humidity without leaving plants vulnerable to mildew or other blights.

Temperatures that are too high for too long can dry out and wilt plants quickly without humidity control. However, higher temperatures of 91 F can actually increase yields if the plants can get enough C02 supplementation.

Add C02 and See the Results

Regular Cannabis plants get plenty of carbon dioxide when grown outdoors, but it’s important to enrich C02 levels to match what would be found in nature for indoor grow rooms. You want to begin slowly with around 800 ppm of C02 fed to your small plants starting about 3 weeks into flowering, and then gradually increase the levels throughout the flowering cycle to about 50ppm per day.

By day 51 of flowering, your plants should be getting about 1800ppm of C02, and depending on whether your grow medium is soil, aero, hydroponics, or perlite, there are several ways to introduce C02 to your grow room and your plants.

Strive for a Balanced Ecosystem

Auto-flowering plants do best when their environmental factors are balanced. If climate factors are not controlled and monitored regularly, they can risk your plant’s health and well-being.

All changes to the climate should be made gradually and incrementally. It’s always wise to record conditions in a notebook to have plenty of data on which conditions work best for every individual strain and growing set up.

Any Growing Relationship Needs Quality Time

It’s important to spend time with your plants each day and to monitor both their health and progress. If the leaves are yellowing, or there’s powdery mildew on the plants, something will need to be corrected to stop it from ruining the success of your auto-flower plant.

Believe it or not, your plants are talking to you every day, and they’ll tell you if they need adjustments. If so, it is important to be reactive to their needs promptly before chronic issues create quality or quantity shortfalls in your garden. Nutrient issues like potassium or nitrogen deficiencies are easy enough to spot once you understand the signs that the plants are showing you.

Auto-flowering plants grow very quickly and may need the lights raised higher or to be staked up to support excess weight. If one plant gets into trouble, there are plenty of issues that could spread to the rest of the garden very quickly if left unattended.

Auto-flowering Cannabis Seeds Yield Positive Results

For novice growers or those with strict limitations on space and power that they can dedicate to their garden, auto-flowering seeds perform well in a relatively short amount of time, offering bountiful yields of quality flowers rapidly and consistently.

These plants tend to like things warmer than their photoperiod counterparts because they’re not usually found in nature but developed by seed geneticists indoors. As such, they need a bit more care and attention than the wild ruderalis genetics they were created from.

Ultimately, a precisely controlled climate gives growers maximum flexibility over the types of growing configurations they can use to achieve the best results possible when growing auto-flowering cannabis plants.

Learn more about growing autoflowering marijuana strains:

– Are Autoflowering Strains Potent?

– How to Increase Yield of an Autoflowering Cannabis Strain

– When to Harvest an Autoflower Strain

– What Are the Best Nutrients for Autoflowering Seeds?

– Autoflower vs Photoperiod Strains – How Do They Differ?