We stopped defoliating everything in this tent earlier this week. It's a jungle in there. We never grew in a full tent-sized raised bed before, so this is quite interesting to watch them all grow together, fighting for the light. Just letting this one grow naturally until the finish line, adding water as needed, along with our weekly organic foliar spray to prevent fungus.
@Mastr, Thank you.
Yes, I've grown quite a few autoflowers before. In my experience, they are more difficult to work with than photoperiods and I stopped growing them for a while, but I started back again because most CBD-dominant strains are autos.
They are more difficult for a few reasons, and it depends on exactly what you were unhappy about. It's hard to give specific advice without knowing what went wrong, but one hard thing is that they usually have a much quicker vegetative phase, and begin to flower when their roots are established enough or disturbed by transplanting or running out of "feet room".
I really do enjoy building up to the quality structure I'm looking for before a plant enters the bloom phase, which is the main reason I prefer photoperiodic varieties, but a lot of autoflowering cultivars require being more careful with light, heat, training techniques, and other forms of stress in both vegetative and flowering phases to get good quality. Some even prefer longer than "conventional" 18-hour days to get more bio-mass or bud density. There are a few things I've mentioned that you could try, but the important thing is making sure your days are long enough, it's not too cool, you don't disturb them by means of transplanting them or high-stress training techniques, and more.
If none of that works, feel free to shoot over a message, or maybe give a photoperiod a try, since you can play with it until you're happy with its form, and then flip it to bloom.
I hope this helps, and thanks again!