Yo, yo, yo, guys, what is up? Welcome back to another episode of marijuana sa weekly. And today, Dean and I are going to be showing you a little bit of the differences between auto flowers and PHOTOPERIODIC. seeds and plants, cannabis plants. So we get obviously asked on the daily and then obviously guess gives out a lot of the answers on it. How many times a day.

Couple. And it’s and I mean, on the online, it’s also something that searched quite heavily, it seems to be, you know, stola deficit of information within South Africa as to what the difference is. So even though this is something we’ve spoken about before, we thought it’d be cool to revisit the topic and just have a look at what the actual differences are between PHOTOPERIODIC cannabis seeds and autoflowering cannabis seeds

we did take some we saw some images just off the web. And they I think they were from the for 20 beds website, and some other content but yet nothing in here is originally I was just letting you guys know. Okay, Dean, where do we where do we want to start here? You pop on to the next screen.

Okay, yeah, so I mean, the main difference between the two kinds of plants is the genetic makeup like the most PHOTOPERIODIC seeds contain what was known as sort of sativa or indica basis, and would have been sort of, you know, originally found in areas where you have longer summers or long summers and and where the where the life cycle would drastically tray or drastically change, whereas an auto flower plant would have been the original auto flower is a strain called ruderalis. ruderalis was a strain of cannabis that originated in places where there were incredibly short summers. And a lot of the time the sun would never set during that period. So for that plant to survive, it was unable to rely on light cycle to go into to complete its lifecycle. And it would have then just relied on maturity or age. So basically, the plant would flower out under a technically a 24 hour of sunlight. ruderalis generally, though, has very, very low, it has an interesting plant structure, but it has very, very low THC. So what the clever breeders have done is they have bred in sort of more stable, higher THC PHOTOPERIODIC strains, and then they have bred the auto flowers to so that they are giving sort of higher higher values of the auto flower trait. However, also the auto flower trait is recessive. So if you take that line further, without constantly looking for the auto flowering gene in it, you could actually breed out the auto flower trade from it. And just a little sidebar here personally, I’ve seen sort of in batches of maybe there’s like a 1% chance you’re going to get a you’re going to get an auto flower that doesn’t auto I’ve personally had them. And I’ve also seen in in a lot of the a lot of the seeds that we’ve moved over our time, you know that it, it does happen. And I think personally that comes from the that specific trait being recessive. So PHOTOPERIODIC relies on lightcycle to go into flower, whereas auto flower relies on age and maturity. And it generally will go into flower under a full light environment. So good flowered in your veg tan, you could fly it out in the start of summer, you could fly it out in winter, and it’s not really going to care about the lifecycle of PHOTOPERIODIC planted in winter would probably go into into early flight wouldn’t rely on its maturity.

So like it’s the nice thing is you can sort of one one bonus like with the lightcycle is you can have plants at different ages stages, you can plant at any point in your tent, and you can have, it’s not really going to affect it besides like it’s going to be a little bit of an inconvenience. But whereas if you tried to do that same thing was photoperiods It’s not going to it’s not going to gel, you’re going to have to try get all your plants at the same age for for it to, you know, for you effectively to flower out at one point.

Yeah. And also just before we move on to the next slide, you can also the major difference between for me personally between autoflowers and PHOTOPERIODIC is the size and the yield. I mean, you can clearly see in this in this description here that from the fourth 20 phosphates, that the PHOTOPERIODIC plant is far larger. It also grows in a different way without training it would grow into the sort of Christmas tree style, whereas an auto flower a lot of the time will actually look like it’s It’s had some kind of some kind of training done to it, you know, so it grows out lots of more side branches. And those side branches sometimes achieve the same height as the main the main branch on an auto fly. Whereas with a PHOTOPERIODIC, you’re getting this more Christmas tree style plant a lot of the time, and that trait with the side branches that come out and sort of matches in the, that’s a trait that you see in the in the ruderalis. So they have a very interesting formation. However, you know, on average, I’ve pulled between sort of 35 and at a maximum around sort of 80 grammes per per autoflower consistently, whereas on PHOTOPERIODIC, you can easily pull you know, a lot more so smaller yields, however, you can fly them out at any time. That was they’ll just do their thing. You know, you don’t have to worry about life cycles and, and all of that our auto flowers more beginner friendly than PHOTOPERIODIC it seems to be sort of the mentality with a lot of people because you see the word auto flower, but like I personally find PHOTOPERIODIC eat more beginner friendly to auto flowers or to flowers are quite finicky in week one to two of their of their life cycle. Yeah, they’re

the photo seems to be a little bit a little bit stronger from time to time. But that’s that’s just I think that’s just anecdotally All right. PHOTOPERIODIC auto topping, I think is sort of, I don’t know, they just do what the image is trying to depict. So

I wouldn’t suggest topping a photo appear and auto flower unless you are limited on space. Like when I did the when I did that auto flower grow series in that oh acre a tent on its side, I could have potentially taught those because they they did end up growing more vigorously than I then I had expected. But sort of generally, as a rule of thumb, you know, an auto flower is a because it’s on such a limited time. And because it can get shocked and push it into early flower, you want to go for low stress methods on your auto flower. And then you want to go for either high stress or low stress on your PHOTOPERIODIC. So with an auto flower, generally, I would only suggest the utilisation of low stress training. And I would also suggest the utilisation of low stress training from very early on low stress training isn’t a thing that you do at one point. And a lot of the time I see people try and low stress strain, sort of when the plants just about to go into flower, you know, but a low stress strain is something that you do day in and day out every single day adjusting your ties or putting a new tie down to as the plant grows, you’re it’s actually growing into the low stress strain while it’s still malleable. So you’re doing it consistently. And then you can get good results. And the more consistently you do it and the earlier you start, the less stress it’s going to put on the plant meaning you’re going to get better results on the on the on the low stress train. So also stuff like typing, you know, once again, it’s not really recommended that you type your your auto flower. If it’s a really really vigorous one and you’re running out of space, yes. If it’s a more sort of temperamental one and you aren’t sure just stick with the just stick with the low stress training

Cloning. Yeah, that’s a big part of the difference between the autos and the photos and the guys just wanted to jump in. With a mention you guys can sign up to mela below in the description. And we’re going to be releasing a bit of a grow guide soon. So yeah, just drop your email, subscribe, and then you’ll be notified as soon as that’s ready. And then also you can see some cool specials and stuff that we have as part of like email only deals. Yeah, Dean, whatever is going on with the cloning, cloning situation.

So this is a two prong thing because it’s, it’s related to the breeding and the growing like when you are breeding photoperiods You can keep your original mother plant alive and then you can use that to cross it back into your genetic line. Then stabilise it. And that’s what a lot of breeders will do. But when you’re breeding auto flowers you are the plant grows, the plant flowers, the plant dies, you can never keep that plant going, you know, according by manipulating the lifecycle. So I, once again, this is a personal, this is personal, but I would personally say that the auto flowers are harder to breathe and the PHOTOPERIODIC because you can’t keep, you can’t keep a plant alive. And if you made the fact standing up along the line, you can’t go and then come back and restart, again, you are breathing along the line, it’s a limited time, you’ve got three months, then it’s done. And then you’re on your next breeding set. So your the plant grows, and flowers out and it it dies off, essentially. So like it says here, one seed per plant, and it’s the same when you’re growing, you know, you’re planting autoflower seed you’re growing out, it may be absolutely amazing. And then you’ll get those seeds again, and you’ll get a different expression, you know, so you’re never going to be able to hold on to an expression that you find. Whereas with a PHOTOPERIODIC seed, because it relies on lightcycle. Technically, if you were to plant a seed, and to keep that under an 18, six vegetative lightcycle, you could take millions of clones from it over over the years, and you could grow millions of plants from one single seed. So, you know, it’s quite interesting. So once again, you know, it pushes towards, I think on a sort of scalability and an on a perpetual cycle, the PHOTOPERIODIC make sense. But then you could also apply and you could also offset your auto flower planting dates from each other and sort of plant an auto flower once every three weeks. And then after, you know, 12 weeks, you would start to see harvest, and then your earlier, your earlier, the plants which are younger will then sort of fall into the space. So the way you would run a perpetual cycle on both of them is different. But you know, you are going to only if you get an amazing expression, it’s quite sad, because you will never get that you will you might get it again, you know, something similar, but you’ll never get that exact same expression again, and you can’t keep that plant alive, meaning it does affect the way you grow. And it does affect the way that auto flowers are bred as well.

Yeah, it’s a nice, I mean, it’s a nice concept I like I really tried to go for the perpetual on the autos, but doesn’t mean it doesn’t necessarily mean that you know, you can have, you know, multiple plants in one size tent, you kind of actually you still need a lot of space, because like that’s your thing, you’re like, Oh, if I want to do, you know, a perpetual on the photos, I’m gonna need a you know, three, four tents, you know, like a big space and like to almost have consistent, like Harvest almost month month. But the same of the audits, you know, you need loads of space to get around because you know, you’re trimming plants at different phases, you do you know, each plant, and it’s different cycle you doing training at different phases. So it’s, we can’t really have a clear winner on either of those. But yeah, cloning is a massive advantage. Now let’s have a look at the lifecycle. I mean, we have mentioned it, but what’s the what’s the brief here?

Yeah, so I mean, you can see now on the way that they it’s basically as I’ve just mentioned, so this would be considered a perpetual harvest in a in a photo periodic, you would need two smaller spaces, one where you keep at an 18, six vegetative cycle, and then one where the light would be 12 on 12 off, and that would be your flowering room, and your vegetative room would feed into your flowering room. Whereas with an auto flower, technically, you could just do it all in one, slightly larger space, as Andy just mentioned here, so you can see the seeding phase, the veg phase, the early flower, and the late flower, all in one space. Now, personally, I wouldn’t do that because you want to have your higher humidity during your vegetative cycle and a lower humidity during your flowering cycle. But if you’re limited on space, and you never want to run out of weed, and you willing to pay the attention to detail, you know, it is possible to be able to do that. So the auto flowers give you they simplify the light control aspect by not having to adjust anything, but like also I personally feel with the timer, you know, you can really it’s not that complicated to control to control light cycle. So it’s once again, you know, after preference, but it does kind of depict the differentiation in the way that you would handle the two different the two different plants. And once again, in this example here, you can see that the autoflowers came out far smaller than the PHOTOPERIODIC six and nine times out of 10. For me personally that’s been that’s been the case.

It’s I mean, you’re like I really want to emphasise the attention to detail because if you are going to go for like one tent and all the plants You know, you really have to like each plant you know, each plant is different on a different you have your it’s difficult to track a feeding schedule unless you sort of label each plant and then you have this one’s this age, this one’s this age, this one’s this many weeks and then you have a seed that doesn’t take so now you’re there’s a three week three to six week gap and inside it’s kind of also, it’s not like you can hold a patent each plant sort of has to have its own label. Yeah, there’s complexity is automated watering doesn’t work. So lacquer because you have your big plants that are absolutely chomping water and your smaller seedlings are getting annihilated by the by the overdose.

Yeah, and your big plants might be on flowering nutrients, raise your small plants would be on on vegetative nutrients. So you can’t run it off the same automatic watering system, if you if you were, you know, if you’re doing something like a pump into a reservoir. So like they are complex, there are complexities. But if we’re doing four plants, and each of them was three weeks apart, and you were really paying attention to detail, it would be possible. But once again, you know, it’s I think it’s up to PERS it’s up to personal.

Maybe it’s pest control as well, if you’re doing any sort of topical sprays or anything like that it’s in you know, you’ve got some plants and flower and some plants, you know, in veg, it’s also going to have a throw some complexities that way. It does, you know, like it yeah, complicated, because, you know, we obviously, try target a home grower, but we also want to help people with efficiency and like getting the maximum yield at the end of the day. And I think clubs or clubs go for sort of the standard model. It’s hard to pull off the perpetual auto. Okay. Yes, it is a graphical example. Anything you want to point out?

Yeah. So once again, like have you have a look at the plot on the right, that’s our PHOTOPERIODIC. And our points on the left is our otter, the otter fly, you can see if you look at the, the main cola is still above the rest. But if you look at the uniformity of the buds, on the left hand side, you can see how all of the stems grew out in sort of an LST styled fashion. And like, you know, you could achieve that with the plant on the right. But I would imagine that this was achieved relatively easily without very much training at all, you know, so the formation of the plant is sort of a nice uniform formation with a lot of side branches coming out. Whereas on the PHOTOPERIODIC, you can see the main stem has still pushed the most and that main stem has been pushed out less uniform kind of flowers, as the plant has been growing, you know, so you get a, you get a slightly different formation. And then also, I’m not sure if this one on the right is in the ground, it might be so that like might not be the best example. But the size, once again, is is different. But for me, the main thing is sort of the way the the way that the plant has has grown, you know, you always see these strong side branches in a uniform fashion coming out of an auto flower. And you will always without training, sort of see the more Christmas tree styled photo periodic, and nine times out of 10, your photo is going to be far larger than your then your auto flower.

Last topic that we want to that we want to just go over with you guys is a little bit on the facility side. Doesn’t random facility here. But I mean, do you want to walk us through what what our bigger growers and facilities are sort of thinking about in terms of genetics. So

the bigger when you’re running a business on cannabis, you know, you want to make sure that you are getting good results. Now if you’ve got an board of investors, and that board of investors is putting money into your facility, and you’re spending multimillion Rand you’re gonna want something that is tested. And that is able to give you your grammes per square kilos per square metre or, or however they are going to hire, they’re going to give the KPI because you’re dealing with investment now and you’re dealing with a business and cash flow, you know, so if you’re looking at all of those things, it’s just far too high risk to go and then plant auto flowers and have, you know what, how many plants do we see in front of us? Yeah, hundreds and have hundreds of different results, you know. So when you’re dealing on a facility level, you’re wanting uniformity, and everything to sort of conform to the same kind of nutrient feeding the same kind of, you know, be as pest resistant as each other. So when you’re moving to this level autoflower doesn’t really seem like a viable option. I would imagine that they maybe have you know, this is potentially a mother, a single mother mono crop, where you know exactly what that mother is going To give out, you have a complete genetic copy within each single plant. And then with that being said, you get a complete uniform yield across the across the whole space, you’re getting the same pest resistance, you’re getting the same uptake to nutrients you’re getting, you have the data to know, okay, cool. at week three, my plant is going to start to stack, so I need to put my second strike net in then, you know, so when you hit the facility level, you’re wanting to have something that you know is going to be the same across your whole gross space. And then you would obviously look to a PHOTOPERIODIC, or a tested PHOTOPERIODIC. Mother, and then you’d work from Cloud. So on this kind of level, auto flower doesn’t really doesn’t really make sense. And that’s what I personally feel auto flowers are more viable for a home grower or a hobbyist, they get good search ability over the internet, you know, they seem popular, but when you go to the commercial level, then you start to look at the PHOTOPERIODIC says the only option. And that goes back to our conversation about the clones, and you know, the able the ability for continuity with your, with your plants, and then also, you know, you you’ll probably run that genetic, multiple times in your space to get more and more more data. And if you’re in South Africa, it would need to be traceable, and something of higher quality, you know, so then you’re going to invest money into something that you know is going to give you the results that you that you need.

I have heard that order flowers can be used in like a licenced setting. But I believe it’s only purely just as like a cash flow advantage for getting off the ground. Because you know, if you can get an auto you can sort of have a yield within a within a couple of months shirts or less a yield. But I think it’s sort of if you’re really cash strapped, there is a few strategies that have been adopted for just getting a yield app, that’s, that’s obviously dependent on what licence you’ve got. And it’s not, they’re not expecting a specific, specific qualities in it. And you know, you because then you’re not building reliance.

And some breeders, like Colin, from ethos, his whole mindset is, you know, a seed should be stable. So that seed should be able to be planted at Mass and then you should be able to get consistent results. So breeders, like Colin, say that I’ve seen some text on the internet related to him saying that, you know, it wouldn’t be an option, but you have to then be incredibly confident that the batch of seed you’ve got is stable, you know, if you go and purchase widely labelled auto flowers, and then you plant them across the board and then you get completely different results. That’s going to be you know, that happened because you you the seeds weren’t 100% fully stable, you know, so some breeders believe it is possible. But I from what I’ve seen, the trend is far the trend is far more towards the photo periodic styled, perpetual grow of mothering, cloning, verging and then flowering are from that

same mother stock. Yeah, I mean, like 90% of the guys that we provide of the licenced facilities that we provide seeds for, they all go for photo, probably even 90 95% or go for photoperiods it’s easier, it’s Yeah, and that’s the thing. I think for them, the data is the most important set of even even the clubs, they all come to us for the photos. Alright, guys, that’s pretty much photo periodic Express Auto flowers in a nutshell. Hopefully you guys learned something and can guide you through your decision. For those guys that are new to growing, this should have helped a lot and for those that are regulars on the channel, hopefully we didn’t overlap on some stuff, but we thought we’d bring you some fresh content on this topic because it’s been a while since we’ve touched on it and we still have to help put out as much education and some of our older videos tend to just they need no need reviving from now and again, please make sure to subscribe and like it does help this channel grow because we very obviously demonetized and we are hidden behind the age restriction so you guys that are watching this are our our only audience on YouTube. We don’t get shown to most of YouTube so yeah, the support really goes a long way. And make sure again to sign up to that email list that also will give you access to be able to look at our growth guide or purchase a pro guide when it comes out. And that will be probably in the next month or so.