Purple Punch Auto Grow Diary and Strain Review

This run with Purple Punch Auto from Fast Buds was my first serious indoor grow. I had a friend with more experience helping me choose the setup, because on my own I barely knew where to start and didn’t want to waste money through beginner mistakes.

The only free place for the box was the balcony, so I built the grow around a 90 x 90 x 180cm (35.4 x 35.4 x 70.9in) budget tent with ventilation, a filter and a Mars Hydro TS 1000. The medium was coco with perlite, and the nutrient line was BioBizz. I started with 5 seeds, hoping that an autoflower would be a forgiving enough choice for a first try.

24% THC

Purple Punch Auto (Fast Buds)

• Autoflowering
• Catching relaxing bubbles
• 450 - 600 g/m² indoors
  60 - 200 g/plant outdoors

Pack (number of seeds)

3

5

$43.26 $66.95 72.1 Save 5.15

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Starting the Run

Week 1-2

The start was mostly about learning the room. The seedlings came up and began turning into small real bushes, but the balcony setup brought one problem right away: heat. Even with the blinds down, the old thermometer inside the box showed almost 30°C (86°F).

My friend told me to watch the coco moisture more carefully and not let it dry out too hard. I followed that advice, spraying the plants from above every day and watering either with plain water or a light solution at the roots. By the end of week 2, I set the light to 75%, with the lamp 40cm (15.7in) above the plants.

Week 3

Week 3 was the hottest part of the early run. Outside, it was over 30°C (86°F) in the shade, and inside the box with the lamp on, the temperature reached 35°C (95°F). Humidity also dropped to 40%, even with daily watering and spraying.

The plants still looked tougher than I expected, but the tops began showing signs of heat stress. I added another fan in the middle of the week and raised the light to 60cm (23.6in). At the end of the week, my friend came over and showed me how to do LST properly. It looked simple enough, though I was still nervous about doing it alone.

Veg Progress and Training

Week 4

Rainy weather finally cooled the balcony and the box a little. After the first LST attempt, the plants didn’t look great, so I removed the stakes instead of forcing them to stay tied down.

In the middle of the week, I noticed the first pistils and prepared a flowering mix. Before switching nutrients, I flushed the coco well with water to clear out what was left from the previous feed. Until the end of the week, I watered only with filtered water. The growth was surprisingly fast: the plants more than doubled and reached almost 30cm (11.8in).

Week 5

I count week 5 as the first flowering week. The lamp went to full power, but the plants started stretching so quickly that I had to correct the height almost every day. They were adding about 4-5cm (1.6-2in) daily, mostly through the central stem.

The side branches lagged behind, so I used a few soft ties and removed around 10 leaves from the upper part of the plants to let light through. During the week, I gave 2 waterings with the new flowering nutrients, TopMax and Bio Bloom. The plants clearly wanted more food now.

Week 6

Since the last nutrient watering had been at the end of the previous week, I only fed once this week and used filtered water the rest of the time.

The plants were still pushing upward hard. The tallest one reached 100cm (39.4in), and more bud sites appeared, though they were still very small. I kept removing a few leaves every day, mostly to keep the canopy from turning into a wall of shade.

Early Flower

Week 7

By week 7, the plants were healthy, but they didn’t look like the neat examples I had seen in other diaries. They had stretched a lot, and the buds were still modest.

The 2 main plants also started showing different characters. The taller one had longer branches, smaller buds and a lighter lemon-green color. The shorter plant was fuller, darker and already had more resin on its flowers. The strange part was the smell: both were equally sweet. I watered twice with nutrients and 3 times with water, giving 2l (0.5gal) each time. The coco stayed wet longer after that.

Week 8

The plants looked better this week. The buds had filled out a little, and the first real trichome coverage became easy to see on the surface.

The aroma also changed in a way I didn’t expect. One plant smelled closer to pineapple, while the other reminded me of strawberry. For a moment, I even wondered if the seeds were from different strains, but my friend said it could simply be a phenotype difference. I watered every other day and gave nutrients once.

Week 9

There wasn’t much new in week 9, which was not a bad thing. I kept following the watering and feeding routine, and the plants seemed to like it.

The smell had become harder to ignore by this point. The sweet fruity side was pleasant, but it also made it clear that the filter was not just a nice extra. The buds were still developing, so I kept the routine steady instead of trying to push anything new.

Week 10

I continued shaping where I could, mostly by moving branches and removing leaves that blocked light. At this stage, I wasn’t trying to create a perfect canopy anymore. The plants had already chosen their shape.

The taller plant still looked stretched and less promising, while the shorter one seemed more productive. Both kept flowering, though, so I stayed patient and let them finish at their own pace.

Late Flower and Finish

Week 11

By the final stretch, the grow had already taught me more than I expected. The plants didn’t become perfect catalog bushes, and the stretch was stronger than I wanted, but they made it through heat, my first LST attempts and the rough learning curve of a balcony box.

The buds finished with a sweet fruit smell, and the resin coverage looked much better than it had in the earlier flowering weeks. I know this result was far from the limit, but for a first attempt, it felt like something I could build on.

Purple Punch Auto Yield and Final Thoughts

Purple Punch Auto was not as simple as I imagined when I started reading about autoflowers. The plants stretched harder than expected, heat was a constant issue, and my first LST attempt was clumsy enough that I backed off for a while.

The best part of the run was the smell. One plant leaned toward pineapple, the other had more of a strawberry note, and both stayed very sweet through flower. That difference between the 2 plants surprised me more than anything else in the cycle.

I don’t see this as the maximum the strain can do. It was my first grow, and the setup had obvious limits, especially with the box sitting on the balcony. Next time, I’d control heat better and start training with more confidence. Still, Purple Punch Auto got me through the first real cycle, and that alone made the run worth it.

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