Did you get regulars or juniors?
Juniors are really the best for most autos. With the wicking area in the center and center planted, it's about 14 days from Sprout when you'll be able to add a decent amount of water to the reservoir in about 21 days before you can fully fill it. When I say most Autos, I mean the more smaller size. While it can be done with the bigger varieties or heavy feeders, the nutrient mound will get pretty huge. Being organic it takes time for it to be available to the plant, so you gotta think ahead a little bit. An absolute must is keeping an eye on the root intrusion into the nutrient Mound. If it's completely covered with roots, you're too late! And it is perfectly fine to mound up the nutrients by quite a bit.
Now a regular earth box with autos, it's really best to do things a little different. Your larger and more longer lived autos will be best for a regular earthbox. One is the size of the container that will support a large plant. The other is the fact that a longer lived plant will have more time to establish that relationship with the wicking area. It takes longer to establish that relationship in a regular earth box since the wicking areas are on each end. Now you can actually shorten that time period to almost exactly the same as a junior, by planting on one end. The training technique you would use with that scenario is let it come up and then take a top pull toward the other end of the Earth box. This avoids the stress of topping and actually does the same thing as topping, but in a very low stress manner. The laying over method of training will give you a very large amount of tops. The bottom branches will turn upward and form tops.
The main thing with Earthboxes is to
Strive to keep nutrients out of the reservoir. You can get by with it sometimes and then other times it will bite you in the butt! I screwed up in my 4x4 tent on the current grow with the exact thing I'm talking about. I monitored the root intrusion into the nutrient mound, but I ignored it for a few days because I really didn't believe the extent that it had intruded. It was far sooner than it had in the any other grow beforehand. Then I noticed a fade in the color and tried to make it up by adding some
J to my nutrient mound. Well some of that washed into the reservoir and I added water to the reservoir too soon. This caused the reservoir reservoir to flip in ph and damaged my roots. I probably could have got by if I had not added the water too soon. And I may have gotten away with it, if it had been a previous grow. But I'm using additional CO2 in this grow and upped the lights. When running like that, the plant is growing at a crazy rate and your nutrients must be in order. Things got bad quickly because of the rate of growth. That's it plain and simple.
Feel free to message me or post up in my thread, if you have any questions. Taking look at my ongoing thread that's in my signature. I thoroughly document what I do. I'd be happy to help you in any way possible.
Can you guess what's about to happen?
It's time to celebrate Mars Hydro's 15th BIRTHDAY! 
