Keep the clone thing in mind in the future, It will save you some bud in the long run. Timing on autos is tricky as you know, my first time reversing an auto I just sprayed a couple branches and let it pollinate itself. She made about 5000 seeds, which I harvested and threw the rest of the plant away. Now I just put the branch I want to reverse in the aeroponic cloner and start spraying until I see sacs. I keep them going in my cloner until the pollen starts to drops and I collect it. Then the next time I grow that strain again or one I will want to cross it with I will pull out the pollen. That way I’m not trying to race the clock with autos. Photos are so much easier to feminize.
I use a 2x2x4ft tent as a breeding and seedling tent. I have one Autocob inside which is more than enough light and keeps the tent nice and warm the way babies like it. I have my cloner in there all the time which leaves room for three 3 gallon fabric pots or I can get as many as 10 one gallon fabric pots inside, depending on my needs.
Sorry, I somehow missed this reply.
Down the road I might be able to use a small tent for pollen collection, at the moment it's not an option. I've never tried to feminize a photo or an auto (although I have pollinated photos the traditional way), so I just want to go through the process once, and then see if it's worth it. In my big picture, I'm currently doing one outdoor per year and running six plants, so I don't need a lot of seeds. The truth is, if Mephisto were a real company that had a catalogue of seeds that were consistently available, I wouldn't be doing any of this.
My only concern with your open area is how do you eliminate all light during your dark period? While most autos are not photosensitive for bloom, I have seen some strange effects when stray light got into a grow.
That's interesting. What kind of "strange effects"?
The room they are in has very consistent daily light patterns, so from that perspective, that's the best I can do. Since they can be grown under 24/0 lighting (although I've heard that's not optimal, still, that it can be done says something), I have to imagine that they don't "need" a complete dark black out period. I've also grown outdoors -- photos and autos -- on a property where they were partially under a street light, and never had absolute darkness, and they were fine year after year. My experience has been that as long as the light variations throughout the day are pattern consistent, the plants seem to adapt to it.
But like I've said, this is my first time growing autos indoors, so I'm relying heavily on what I've read, and I've read that autos can be completely unaffected by random light changes. Of course we know not everything we read is true. I've seen pictures of people growing them next to a window in their homes in rooms where the lights go on and off throughout the day. It never really made sense to me. I can imagine that a 100% ruderalis strain could be light insensitive (so to speak), but since all the "autos" we grow are indica/sativa/ruderalis hybrids, I do wonder. That's a lot of genetic influences. Which is another reason I don't have that much invested in this experiment.
I suppose if one (or more) of the girls I intend to be a recipient hermies, that would mess everything up. To a degree. I chose strains with overlapping genetic heritage, so hopefully any combination of them will be... at least interesting.
I ended out going on a late night stoned seed buying spree a few days ago, so if this fails, I'll be fine, like, for a couple of years. I would love to reproduce and save some of these Mephisto strains though, no telling if they'll ever be available again.
