What is autoflowering

can someone please tell me what autoflowering means ?

Normally most cannabis strains flower outdoors in the fall/winter as they need short days and long nights to trigger their natural process to start flowering. This is why when growing indoors for the first part of a cannabis plant’s life cycle, for the “veg” or vegetative growth cycle, a long “day” period of around 18 hours is given with a short “night” period of only 6 hours, similar to what you might find outdoors in the summer. And then when wanting the plant to start flowering and developing its buds/nuggets the light period is dropped to only 12 hours of light with 12 hours of darkness.

Why not more darkness to simulate the really short days of winter? Well all plants need light for photosynthesis and cannabis is a c4 type plant and therefore does very little to no metabolizing during the dark period and so as much light as can be given without causing the plant to revert to a summer vegetative growth cycle is wanted for maximum metabolizing and production of flowrers/buds and trichomes and THC, etc.

Autoflowers are ruderalis hybrids. Ruderalis is a strain of cannabis that in the wild grows in the artic circle where it may have up to 6 months of 24 hours of light a day in the summer and 24 hours of darkness in the winter, and so ruderalis cannabis has evolved to grow fast and automatically flower once it gets to a certain size even though it never gets any long dark periods like its more southern wild counterparts. And so these can be grown indoors under 24 hours of light making them ideal for small indoor grows that need to be able to grow from seed to harvest in a small area and in a short amount of time.

I read somewhere that 24 hour light is too stressful on the plants,what are your thoughts on that?

Auto flowers strains are designed for maximum growth in the shortest period of time. Yield is much smaller than regular Indica, or, Sativa strains.

I would never use a 24/0 photo period for any Cannabis strains, other than Ruderalis…Auto-flower strains. Go for it!