Purple Punch Auto Grow Diary: How to Grow it From Seed to Harvest

Hi, everybody! I invite you to take a look at my Purple Punch Auto grow diary, which I started last winter and finished in a short 70 days with very satisfactory results. I grew this Fast Buds strain indoors in a small 2’x2’ tent along with two other plants and harvested just over an ounce of amazing dry bud. Hopefully, this grow review will show you how to grow Purple Punch Auto (and how NOT to grow it, lol).

Purple Punch Auto Grow: Setup

I got Purple Punch Autoflower and two other strains by Fast Buds – a Lemon Pie and a Z – as a gift for Christmas and decided to plant them right away, although I knew that I would have very little time to care for them with ice fishing season and all. I thought I’d give them a try without much love and care and hardly any nutrients and see how they did.

For indoor grows, I’ve got a 2’x2’ Mars Hydro grow tent (60x60x90 cm) and two LED grow lights: one for veg and one for the flowering stage. My tent is big enough to fit 3-4 autoflowers at a time. In this run, I planted my 3 seeds in a 5-gallon fabric pot each. As you’ll see from my grow review, smaller grow bags would’ve probably worked just as well.

Purple Punch Auto Diary: Seedling Stage

I germinated the seeds in a glass of water. I find this method very straightforward and reliable. What I do is just let the seeds float on the surface until they crack and grow taproots to about half an inch (1 cm). I then plant them into the soil and know for sure that they are alive and will come up within a day or so.

The trick is not to plant them too deeply (so that they don’t waste time and energy emerging out of the soil) but not too shallow either – this helps them to shed the ‘helmet head’ on their own. Half an inch deep works fine for me.

Planting seeds straight into 5-gallon containers makes it rather difficult to calculate the amount of water to give them each day. I usually water the pots to saturation a few days before planting the seeds and then only give seedlings a tablespoon per day around the base. This is how I encourage the roots to grow deep in search of moisture.

On the other hand, using big containers from day 1 saves my autoflowers the shock of transplanting. Moreover, when you give your plants so much soil, you can forget about feeding them throughout the vegetative phase. This time around, I decided to go even further and see how my Purple Punch Auto and others grew without much feeding at all. Spoiler alert: they would show all kinds of deficiencies, but the yields would still be amazing.

Purple Punch Auto Grow Journal: Veg

All I needed to do during veg was give my girls water and make sure that the relative humidity was more or less comfortable – between 40 and 60% – and the temperature close to ideal. I kept it around 77°F (25°C) during the day and let it drop to no more than 63-68°F (17-20°C) with the lights off.

They all grew vigorously, with Purple Punch Auto being the most Indica-looking of the three. She had broad leaves and just a couple of very short side branches, while the others had narrow Sativa-like leaves and side branches that were competing in height with the main stem.

There was some yellowing on the edges of the lower fan leaves. People often misdiagnose this as potassium deficiency, but I think it was due to my 100W Mars TS600 LED being too powerful for such a small space.

As a whole, the vegetative stage was short and trouble-free. According to the strain info on the Fast Buds website, the total Purple Punch Auto grow time from seed to harvest is 9 weeks. In my case, it was 10 weeks, as I harvested her on day 70 – together with the Lemon Pie and a week before the Z. The veg lasted 4 weeks, and the plant started to flower on her own with a standard 18/6 light schedule.

Purple Punch Auto Flowering Time

The flowering stage lasted 6 weeks in total from the day I saw the first pistils until harvest. I was still paying little attention to my grow and continued to keep my girls on a strict diet. Only occasionally, I would give them some nutrients meant for flowering, meaning with more phosphorus and potassium than nitrogen.

I also changed the light as soon as the budding started. I started running a 200W Phlizon PL-2000 LED. I figured my autoflowers, though quite small, would benefit from more than twice as many watts as in the veg. Actually, they didn’t – a lot of the leaves started to turn dry, crispy, and twisted. Part of the reason was certainly calcium deficiency (it was one of many, lol), but light stress probably played its part as well.

I defoliated my Purple Punch Auto and her neighbors quite heavily. Looking back now, I think this might have been a mistake. When the plants are starving – and mine certainly were – they can take some of the nutrients (the mobile ones) from older leaves and direct them to newer growth. In my case, there was no such extra source of nutes, and that made the starvation even worse. Of course, defoliation helps let enough light to every bud site, but with such a powerful LED, it isn’t an issue anyway.

Be that as it may, my Purple Punch Auto was chugging along and developing big and dense buds. The main cola was especially impressive – it would weigh 15 grams dried and cured! The plant might have not been the best-looking one, but does that matter when the harvest is in the jars?

Purple Punch Auto from Fast Buds

VIEW STRAIN

The Harvest and Smoke

The size and texture of the buds on my Purple Punch Auto were the best of the three and the yields were the second-best, and only because there were too few side branches and those were very small. I’ve seen complaints online that some Purple Punch Auto plants were not turning purple. Mine did and looked practically black. Unfortunately, my crappy phone pics don’t do this beauty any justice.

My Purple Punch was the earliest of the three to produce trichomes, and they were evidently bursting with THC and terpenes, as the smoke, even uncured, was super sweet with tropical fruity notes and packed quite a punch. I don’t use a microscope, so I don’t know exactly when to harvest – I just push my plants to the longest time the breeder recommends. Maybe that’s why the smoke was 100% Indica and made me relaxed, happy, and sleepy – perfect to use late at night before a stressful day.

To wrap up my Purple Punch Auto week-by-week diary, I must say that I loved growing her and will do it again. I can also recommend this weed strain to anyone. Happy growing!

Herbies Head Shop expressly refuses to support the use, production, or supply of illegal substances. For more details read our Legal Disclaimer.