No reason not to top autos. They're just a cannabis hybrid. It's not that common a perspective here on RIU but another site that I frequent has a much older demographic and many growers there speak of autos in a very negative manner. My understanding is that the earlier "versions" of autos were pretty lame. I've only been growing since 2021 and my experience with autos has been excellent. In fact, the only grows that haven't worked out well were with photos and, in both cases, it was my own doing. One was ignorance (not enough fans to stave off bud rot but it was a very wet spring time) and the other was just plain stupid (I wanted to not have to clean my humidifier so I added a little H2O2 and then a little more and then a little more until I realized that I had kept the algae out of my humidifier but had damaged my plant).I have done lst, but it's been a while. I was hoping to keep one alive and unmoldy.
I wasn't sure how much time I had to train on an auto. I was thinking not much. I'll be happy to hit the flower stage now
I wasn't planning on topping it, but I could. The training time thing again. It would keep it more even for sure.
I have done it with photo plants.
The I did see some inconsistency between the sizes of plants from the same seed packet but, in my experience and per the folks at a cannabis site that has "auto flower" in the name, they're just another version of cannabis.
What I do like about them is that they grow really quickly but I stopped growing them because it's easier to influence plant size with photos since the grower gets to choose when to flip them. I have a 2' x 4' tent and I usually end up with <75% of the tent full. For my next grow, I'm going to grow two plants and it's easier to get a plant "just the right size" with photos.
One saying that I see on many sites is that "topping slows down growth". No one has ever provided any evidence, naturally. I have to doubt that topping causes any ill effect. My reasoning is that the grower is removing a tiny amount of plant material that has never contributed anything to the growth of the plant and, second, the wound is maybe 1 sq cm and heals within a couple of days. In return for removing the apical stem, the grower can easily achieve a flat canopy which makes it significantly easier to achieve a much more even distribution of light.
Perhaps I'm missing something but I can't justify not topping a cannabis plant.
Let's hear it for tent kits! They're an easy way to start growing.
Until the advent of the LED grow light, growers used a veg light and a flower light. The veg light has a lot of blue in the spectrum and blue light keeps plants short and bushy, with a lot of branches. Before LED's growers used a ceramic metal halide light ("CMH")…I think. When the plant was flipped to flower, growers would you HPS ("high powered sodium"?) which had almost no blue but lots of red and lots of infra red (heat, like in the cafeteria food line). The heat was a total PITA to deal with but the heavy red balance in the spectrum was more electrically efficient than blue lights and red didn't make plants short and bushy. Plants grew much faster in red which made growers call early flower "the stretch" because they started growing rapidly after being kept short by blue (which inhibits cell expansion).
I didn't start growing until the end of the "blurple" LED which were the first generation of LED that had blue light and red light but no green so the light was purple. I tested Photone against my blurple and Photone couldn't get a reading, even though I was using the blurple setting. I contacted the manufacturer of the light (Kind) and the PPFD map for that light was so bad that I put it back in the box (I bought it in 2017, did one grow, and then archived my tent until 2021) and put the box in the trash. The light was just a badly outdated design and I ended up with a Mars SP 3000. The older version was a good light (the new one is not) but then I started learning about grow lighting and decided to go with a veg LED and a flower LED because that's the best approach to getting maximum yield. The were $600 each but the results were quite something.
Only HLG makes "veg" and "flower" lights - they call them "B spec" and "R spec". A flower light will tend to create a plant that is very tall but, since there's so little blue, the plants don't develop that many branches. They look great, because they're tall but lacking being exposed to blue photons in veg, they just don't have the leaf structure that you would see in a plant that was vegged with a lot of blue.
A white LED, like the kind you have, has a balanced spectrum with a fair amount of blue, some green, and then more red. Smaller lights tend to have more blue and I assume that's because the blue weighted spectrum will keep plants shorter and the vendors want that because they don't want customers to have plants growing out of the tops of the 2' x 2' tents.
The big dog in the cannabis grow lighting world is Dr Bruce Bugbee (Google him) and his advice is to go with a white LED that has some "far red", which is "more red" than the deep red that's in most grow lights. Over the past year or so, more lights are coming out with far red but it adds to the price so most lights are still in the PAR range of 400 to 700nm.
Those light will do just fine. It's really up to the grower about how much work they want to put into a grow//what their expectations are. If you get the grow conditions squared away you'll be able to get your plants to 800-1000µmols and you can end up with an excellent harvest. Some growers have really good environments so they just have to not muck things up. Other growers, moi, have to improvise to keep temp and RH, the two hardest factors to control, so it's a bit more work. All in all, though, if you water them the right was, give them lots of food (light), and LTFA*, it's really amazing how much these plants will produce.
*LTFA is an RIU saying for "leave it the f*ck alone". I laughed the I first read it and it is so absolutely true.