Strawberry Gorilla Auto Cannabis Strain Week-by-Week Guide
- 1. Grow specifications
- 2. Grow set up
- 3. Germination and seedling stage | week 1
- 4. Early veg | week 2
- 5. Mid veg | weeks 3-4
- 6. Transition (pre-flower) | week 5
- 7. Early flower | weeks 6-7
- 8. Mid flower (bulk phase) | weeks 8-9
- 9. Ripening and harvest | week 10 (and beyond)
- 10. The outcome
- 10. a. Strawberry gorilla auto yield
- 10. b. Strawberry gorilla auto smoke report
- 11. In conclusion
If you like the over-the-top yields and potency of the best modern autoflowers, you'll appreciate this new Fast Buds creation. Strawberry Gorilla Auto is also a very pleasant-smelling and tasting strain, so it checks all possible boxes for you to place it on your to-grow list.
We're also proud to anounce that our Strawberry Gorilla took the first prize as the Best Sativa at the American Autoflower Cup 2023 where our autos had to compete against the industry's finest. We congratulate the grower who entered this strain into the competiotion and won. He showed remarkable skill, but we modestly hope that the genetics played its part as well.
In this Strawberry Gorilla Auto week-by-week guide, we use the pictures from this award-winning grow as well as three other diaries that weren't competing but clearly deserved it. Two of the growers had to tame the size of their plants, others let them grow naturally, but all employed the simplest and most straightforward techniques. This is what makes this grow guide so valuable -- even complete newbies can repeat these simple steps and get results that will be as great.
1. Grow Specifications
Strawberry Gorilla Auto has about 45% Sativa and 55% Indica, but this almost perfect genetic balance still results in a cultivar that stands out among other Fast Buds strains for its big size of 90-150 cm (34-59 inches). It's no wonder the yields are just as big and reach an amazing 450-600 gr/m2 (1.5-2 oz/ft2) indoors. If instead you choose to grow this weed outside, you can count on 60-300 gr (2-11 oz) per plant depending on your climate and other conditions. Thanks to its hybrid vigor, Strawberry Gorilla Auto grows very fast, so its whole life cycle doesn't usually last more than 10 weeks from seed.
By harvest time, Strawberry Gorilla's flowers get completely obscured by shimmering white frost that is choke-full of cannabinoids and terpenes. When carefully cured, the buds smell of gas and berries and leave a complex taste of skunk, fruit, and pine on your palate. With the THC level reaching 27%, this is an overwhelmingly potent smoke, and the content of CBD is below 1% so nothing can curb its astonishing power.
2. Grow Set Up
Strawberry Gorilla Auto is 2022 release, yet the demand for this strain was high right out of the gate, and there are already many grow diaries available online. The award-winning diary (the one made by Freegrow8) was our obvious choice, as for the other three, we picked those where the gardeners kept things very simple. We think that it's one of the best ways to grow perfect plants, and the more straightforward everything is the more instructional it's for newbies.
In the Freegrow8's diary, the grow tent was rather spacios at 3 m2 and it had a 680W LED installed. When you choose your equipment, we suggest using large grow tents and powerful lamps too. On the one hand, your electricity bill would be higher and probably you won't need so much bud anyway, but on the other hand, it's easier to control temperature and humidity when you have a lot of space, and it's very important. As for the powerful light, it allows you to get bud of unsurpassed density and size.
What was remarkable about this setup was that the lights were on 24 hours a day and yet the Strawberry Gorilla plant started to flower early and finished in as little as 9 weeks from seed.
| Grow Space: | 3.05 m2 (32.81 ft2) | Pot Size: | 3.79 l (1 gal) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed to Harvest: | 9 weeks | Medium: | Coco/soil mix |
| Flowering: | 5 weeks | Nutrients: | Organic |
| Light Cycle: | 24/0 | Final Height: | 42 inches (107 cm) |
| Light Type: | LED | Day Temperature: | 23-24°C (73-75°F) |
| Watts Used: | 680 | Humidity: | 50% |
The other three setups in our review were quite different, but there is a common theme to it all: Gorilla Strawberry Auto is versatile and performs beautifully in any setup and using any growing method.
3. Germination And Seedling Stage | Week 1
During the germination phase and the first week from seed, you can't do much but create optimal conditions for the cannabis plant to thrive. This basically means keeping things warm and humid as you can see in the table below. Besides, when germinating cannabis seeds, don't forget that it should be dark.
There are quite a few germination methods: from keeping a seed on the surface of water to putting it straight into the medium. If you're new to this game, we suggest choosing a method in which you can monitor the state of the seed until you see that it has cracked and shown a taproot. This will signal you that the seed is alive and well and ready to be planted. One of the simplest and most popular methods is the wet-paper-towel method.
One of the first challenges a weed grower faces is removing the seed shell from the sprout. Often, the seed will lose the shell while breaking out from the moist soil. However, sometimes, you'll have to help it lose the 'helmet head'. The easiest way to do it is to constantly wet it with the mister untill the hull gets soft and falls off.
Before the seedling has come up, it can be kept in a warm, dark place. However, when you see the sprout pop out from the ground, you should by all means turn on the lights in your grow tent and keep the young sprouts at the right distance: not too close and not too far.
When you plant your seedling into the medium, you need to decide whether to use the final container from day one or use a starter pot first and then make a transplant. Both methods have their pros and cons, but with autoflowers, especially if you don't have much experience, we recommend using the final container right from the start.
If you grow in soil, which is a recommended option for newbies, you don't have to give your plants any nutrients yet. There will be enough plant food in the soil, especially if you use large final containers.
4. Early Veg | Week 2
During the second week, the young plant won't grow much as at this point in the timeline, most of the action happens underground. The roots are growing at a good pace, going deeper and deeper inside the medium. The young seedling still doesn't have many true leaves. However, a couple of them have already emerged, and they evaporate enough moisture for you to be concerned. If the air is too dry in the grow room, the roots may fail to keep up with the moisture evaporation, and this may slow down the progress of your weed plant. So, take an effort to keep the humidity at a high level. Use a humidity dome if necessary.
At this earliest stage in the lifecycle of a plant, it grows almost imperceptibly, and many newbies get concerned with what they consider a very slow progress. It's very easy to check if your plant is doing OK or not. Compare the size of the first and the second pair of true leaves. If one is about as big as the other on day 10, your plant is doing OK. And don't worry: the plant will pick up the pace in the next couple of weeks.
While it is safer to keep your plant on a diet, especially when it's still small, many growers prefer to start giving their seedlings some plant food during the second week from seed. If you know what you're doing and aren't afraid to overfeed your young ones, start giving them extra nutrients but only in small doses. We suggest starting with about 1/4 or what the nutrient manufacturer recommends and slowly building up the dosages as your autoflower grows.
Besides overfeeding, the most common mistake of novice growers is watering their plants too much and too often. Cannabis hates soggy soil because its roots suffocate when there is too much moisture in the medium. It's because the water forces out the oxygen from the root zone and oxygen is what roots need for breathing. So, water sparingly and let the medium dry out between waterings. If you do this right, your plant will look perky, with leaves oriented towards the light.
When deciding on how far you should keep the light or how much you should dial it down (if it's of the dimmable kind), always see how your plant is taking it. Too much light can stunt the growth and cause light burn, and when the distance is too great, it may lead to excessive stretching. Look at the photograph above. This is what a perfectly healthy 2-week-old seedling looks like.
5. Mid Veg | Weeks 3-4
If your young plant has made it to the third week from seed, it means it has left the most vulnerable stage behind and now will most probably survive. You don't have to be concerned anymore with maintaining high humidity or using a humidity dome. You also shouldn't worry about keeping the temperature on the high side. It safe to lower it now by a degree or two, but still keep it around 23-25°C.
During the second part of the first month from seed, the plant will experience a spurt in growth. At this time your cannabis will not only get taller but will also develop a lot of side branches, especially if the particular genetics is of the bushy kind. If you see the side branches developing early, you can plan the appropriate method of cultivation, eg. ScrOG.
Of course, if your grow tent is spacious enough, you may choose not to train your autoflower at all. Then it will probably get tall and wide, take up a lot of space, but at the same time, it will bring you a generous harvest. This is the road two of the growers in our review have chosen, while the other two had less available space, and so they chose to train their Strawberry Gorilla Autos.
You can tell quite early whether your autoflower will be tall or not. Usually it's Sativas that tend to be tall while Indicas are shorter plants. You can also tell apart a Sativa from an Indica by the color and shape of their leaves. Indicas have wide, roundish, deep-green leaves, and Sativa leaves are narrow and light-green. So looking at the leaves, you can tell whether you're dealing with a Sativa phenotype or an Indica one.
If you have enough vertical space and powerful lights, you can't afford growing tall autoflowers. However, if you're worried that the plants might grow too big for your grow tent or the grow light is too weak to penetrate all the way down, you should train your autos. Training can be as simple as bending down some of the tallest branches, including the main stem, and securing them with braces or pieces of string. This is known as the tie-down method.
Whether you decide to let your plants grow tall or keep them short, you'll have to feed them very well right now as cannabis needs a lot of nutrients during the active growth of the vegetative stage. It requires high doses of nitrogen while the need for the other two macronutrients -- phosphorus and potassium -- isn't as high. So, choose a nitrogen-rich product. There are dozens if not hundreds of nutrient manufacturers out there that cater to cannabis growers.
Below, is just one example of a feeding schedule for an indoor garden which uses some the industry's most popular formulas. You can safely copy it, or choose any other nutrient line that catches your fancy and follow the manufacturer's instructions.
Feeding your autoflower means giving it nutrients with water. It doesn't mean that you have to add them every time. Maybe, a more sensible schedule would be to alternate plain water with a feeding solution. The other option would be to feed every time but with reduced doses.
Don't get carried away with giving your Strawberry Gorilla Auto extra nitrogen or you may get nitrogen toxicity which manifests in leaves turning a too dark shade of green.
6. Transition (Pre-Flower) | Week 5
Things start to get interesting around week five from seed. This is when you may see -- if you look closely enough -- tiny white hairs growing at the nodes -- where the side branches connect to the main stalk. This is the sign that your weed plant finally starts flowering. Simultaneously, it will also start to elongate its main stem and side branches -- something that cannabis growers call the flowering stretch. You may see in the table below how much taller most of the Strawberry Gorillas have gotten by this time.
In the photoperiod varieties, the emergence of white hairs only signals that the plant is mature enough and ready to flower when the days shorten to about 12 hours. However, in autoflowers, once they show sex, they proceed to flower almost immediately and never stop until harvest. This means that what you will see more and more white hairs, first at the middle nodes and then on the tops as well. These will later turn into full-blown flowers.
You will also see a change in color. Before, the plants were uniformly green. Now, the color of the new leaves growing on tops changes to a more yellowish hue.
The beauty of autoflowers is that when you see the signs of budding, you don't need to decide what light schedule to choose. You may keep the same light schedule as before -- up to 24/0, like the one kept by Freegrow8. What you do need to do is switch to a different set of nutrients -- the one that is more appropriate for the flowering stage, meaning the one that has more phosphorus and potassium (P and K) and less nitrogen (N).
7. Early Flower | Weeks 6-7
Regardless of the exact genetic composition, cannabis plants stretch dramatically during the first couple of weeks of flowering, so you better be ready for that and make sure you have enough vertical space. Otherwise, your only option of controlling the height is training. This is especially true of Sativa-dominant varieties, such as Strawberry Gorilla Auto. Look in the table below at how tall the plants have become if the growers let them grow naturally.
Of course, with training, such as LST or more high-stress method, you can turn even a tall strain into a sprawling, low-profile bush like in the photo below. The bonus of keeping the canopy so flat is that every top is at the same distance from the light, so every top bud will have the same size and texture at harvest.
If you completely ignore training, the plant will have a vertical structure, but there's nothing wrong with that too, even indoors. The main thing is to have enough space and to use the lights powerful enough to penetrate all the way to the lowest bud sites. If you doubt that the lowermost branches get enough energy, prune them.
Find below the height chart for Strawberry Gorilla Auto from the first week and till the end of the stretch which happens around week 8.
Of course, the change in size and plant structure is not the only thing that happens in early flower. You will also see the future buds shoot out more and more white pistils (hairs), and then the coveted 'THC crystals' (properly called 'trichomes') will appear on the little leaves surrounding the clusters of flowers. If you haven't had much smell before, it will become very noticeable now.
Even now, in early flower, the most productive of strains, such as Strawberry Gorilla Auto, will start to pack weight. The buds will swell and get noticeably denser. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that they are ready. They still have a long way to go which you can tell by the color of the pistils which are still all white.
8. Mid Flower (Bulk Phase) | Weeks 8-9
As your Strawberry Gorilla Auto plants begin the home stretch of their life cycle, pay more attention to the environmental conditions in your grow tent as things get crowded here and it tends to get hot and humid. Besides, all that lush vegetation interferes with the airflow, and you're facing a serious risk of mold and bud rot if you don't take extra care.
Flowering plants require large amounts of phosphorus (P) and potassium (K), and it's around this time that many growers use PK boosters to stimulate bud production. There's quite a large selection of other ingenious products on the market today that help jumstart the budding and contribute to bigger, more potent, and better-smelling buds. However, they aren't strictly necessary, and if you are still a beginner, you can use a simple flowering nutrient and still get great results. It's seven safer this way because it allows you to avoid overfeeding.
The flowers form large, bulging colas that look heavy (as they in fact are). You may want to think of some type of support for your plants, such as trellises, stakes, or yo-yos, as it's not every branch that can hold so much weight without breaking.
The swelling of the buds isn't the only change that happens now as the color of the buds changes too. The pistils that have given them the characteristic greenish-white look of immature flowers start to wither and dry out, and the buds start to sport bright orange hairs. It's one of the first signals that harvest is near but not the last, nor the most important one. Read on.
Don't forget that under a grow light buds may look more immature than they really are. Sometimes, it's worth taking your plant out of the grow tent and looking at it under natural light -- maybe, the harvest is closer than you thought.
9. Ripening And Harvest | Week 10 (And Beyond)
As you can see from the table below, not all of the four growers we're following here have made it into the 10th week. Two of them have cut down their Strawberry Gorillas after just 9 weeks from seed (which shows how remarkably fast this autoflower is despite its great size and lavish yields). The others waited for one or two weeks respectively and then harvested their ladies as well.
As the plants are nearing the finish line, watch them closely for evidence of bud rot. The tell-tale sign is a dead leaf sticking out of the bud. Luckily, none of the Strawberry Gorilla Autos in our review had this issue although the relative humidity was far from perfect in some of the grows. One of the reasons was this strain's resistance to fungi.
As you look at your full and seemingly mature buds, you'll start wondering whether you should chop your beauties already. Make sure you catch the moment when the buds are at the peak of their quality. The only thing that will tell you with confidence that your marijuana is ready for harvest is the color of the trichomes under a microscope. They start out as clear, then turn cloudy -- as THC and other chemicals in them get stored up -- and finally turn amber (it's when THC starts to degrade). Pick the moment when most of the trichs are cloudy, with only a small percentage of ambers.
Also, don't forget that about a week or two prior to harvest, you should stop giving your weed any nutrients and switch to pure water. This is called flushing and is meant to clean first the medium and then the plant itself of minerals that were useful for the plant but have no business to be in your smoke. As your cannabis doesn't receive any food and is forced to drink lots of water, the leaves begin to fade, and the plant becomes both clean and beautiful to look at.
After cutting down your autoflower, give it a rough wet trim and hang it to dry for about a week in a dark, well-ventilated room before proceeding to trim the buds and putting them in mason jars to cure.
10. The Outcome
Interestingly, the one plant in our review that won the American Autoflower Cup was the least productive of the four. Obviously, it was appreciated by the judges not for the weight of the finished product but for its quality. It was grown in a small, 1-gallon pot as just one part of a large multi-strain grow, so the size and yield were never a goal. The other three Strawberry Gorilla Autos in our review were all amazingly high-yielding.
Strawberry Gorilla Auto Yield
The cup-winning Strawberry Gorilla Auto brought its proud grower (Freegrower8) about 2 oz (56.7 g) of dry bud in 9 weeks -- a respectable result for a SOG grow and for a strain of such quality.
JimmyOG kept his Strawberry Gorilla Auto very short by training it rather aggressively, but this didn't prevent the plant from producing a generous 4.94 oz (140 g) in 12 weeks under a 615W LED.
Finally, CannaTrope harvested 6.6 oz (187 g) from his single Strawberry Gorilla Auto after 10 weeks under a 200W LED light.
Strawberry Gorilla Auto Smoke Report
Based on the smoke reports we have seen, Strawberry Gorilla Auto is potent and not suitable for novice smokers, with a strong head high that comes on gradually and lasts for a long time.
The strain is also described as having a sweet and fruity aroma and taste, with at least one reviewer noting the taste of berries. The high is energizing and uplifting, sometimes leading to a hyped and trippy experience at the beginning before gradually winding down to a more relaxed state.
Strawberry Gorilla Auto would be a good choice for experienced smokers who want a potent strain for daytime use, with a high that can help with focus and creativity. Just make sure you have enough tolerance to handle all that THC and other cannabinoids as the psychoactive power of this strain is no joke.
10. In Conclusion
Based on what we saw in these 4 grows, Strawberry Gorilla Auto is a fast-growing strain. What this means for you is that it can get quite tall if you let your plants grow freely. Remember that in Grower C’s case this autoflower was the tallest of the four from the start? On the other hand, with only some basic training, your Strawberry Gorilla will turn into just a regular indoor autoflower – a compact, multibranch plant, presenting no challenges in terms of height.
This variety also proved resistant enough to survive topping and bring a very generous yield of 140 g (for Grower B). It also performed great in both soil (Growers B and D), coco (Grower C), and even the mixture of the two (Grower A). With other conditions dialed in, Strawberry Gorilla Auto performs like the best of them in any medium.
Overall, Strawberry Gorilla Auto is a good choice for weed enthusiasts who want a high-quality, potent strain with a fruity flavor and energizing high. Happy growing, everyone!
External Links
Fast Buds Wins the American Autoflower Cup 2023
