And Pandora shall also yield clearly above average bud harvests, according to Paradise Seeds, 400-450 grams per m2 (i.e. competitive with regular strains) can be accomplished indoors, and outdoors 60-100 grams per plant. Paradise Seeds even praises Pandora as “currently the best automatic in the world.” She basically consists of 90% indica and 10% sativa, but also contains of course automatic ruderalis flowering genes making her an autoflowering plant. Her indoor life-cycle from seed to harvest is only 60-65 days, and outdoors max. 75 days. Luc describes her as “a medium sized plant, approximately 90 cm indoors to 120 cm tall outdoors, with compact aromatic long-sized buds, topped with a big layer of resin, exhibiting a calyx-to-leaf ratio ideal for quick manicuring.” She is expected to bring about an intense stoned effect, long lasting and relaxing, with medical potential. A sweet ‘n’ spicy aroma and taste complete this excellent plant profile.

This strain is only available in the form of feminised seeds. As he received a small pack of five Pandora seeds late last autumn, The Doc was curious to test Pandora’s indoor abilities at first, with three plants. As at the same time he also conducted a grow with regular strains in his main grow room and didn’t want to interfere with the different (shorter) light cycle required for these, he decided to cultivate the Pandoras, together with three plants of another autoflowering strain, in a small Homebox XS closet with a growing space of 60 x 60 cm, equipped with two 75 Watts Secret Jardin High Efficiency CFL lights. Which are generating very little heat so that one can position the plants very close to them. The three Pandora seeds easily germinated and three days after having sowed them, they had reached the surface of the jiffy pot peat medium. The Doc chose a 20 hour light cycle for growing them, throughout the whole cultivation cycle. Growth was very vivid right from the beginning, and also very homogeneous. Two weeks after germination, the three Pandora plants had developed into compact young plants with a height of about 15 cm and already several side branch onsets having appeared. Leaf colour and shape, expectedly, clearly pronounced indica traits, being dark green and quite broad. Half a week later, after the seedling stage had more or less been passed, The Doc could already detect the first female preflowers at the top of the plants, so everything was going according to plan obviously. In the following weeks, in the course of flowering, the three Pandora plants exhibited a strong stretching effect on both the main stems and side branches. After five weeks, they had arrived at heights of 50-60 cm, still being very compact and having produced a lot of very promising female flower clusters from the bottom to the top, and there already were nice resin build-ups on the flower calyxes and leafs. Also, the plants had started to give off a sweet and spicy smell.

Two weeks later, after about 50 days, bud formation had become quite dense and tight already, and could also convince The Doc with a high calyx-to-leaf ratio, with fairly few flower leaves coming out of the buds that were densely packed with lots of small calyxes. That marvellous bud structure did impress The Doc, he had expected the plants to express some more indica flowering traits, but these Pandora buds did rather look like 50/50 indica/sativa which The Doc considered a great breeder’s achievement. However, another two weeks later, he realised that his three Pandora plants would take somewhat longer to fully ripen than stated by Paradise Seeds. While at the end of the harvest window indicated by Paradise, after 65 days, one could have harvested the plants, as about 50% of the flower hairs were withered meanwhile, The Doc wanted them to reach full maturity and thought that another week at least would also yield even more bud weight. And, indeed, after 72 days, two of the plants were considered fully ripe and harvested, with about 80% of the flowering hairs withered and most of the calyxes thickly swollen. The third plant – which was the fattest one – remained for another three days and was harvested after 75 days. All the three plants had produced very attractive long and thick top colas, and also the side branches were laden with nice dense buds covered with proper amounts of sticky resin, spreading an intense sweet smell that also had a spicy note. In the end they had become 70, 73 and 80 cm tall, not exhibiting a single male flower, so once again a feminised Paradise strain had proven to be very reliable. The Doc was quite impressed by the excellent performance of his three Pandora plants that also turned out to be remarkably homogeneous so that he felt the fact that they took a little bit longer than described was quite negligible.

After he had harvested and slowly dried the Pandora buds over about three weeks, he put them on the scales and happily read amounts of 31, 33 and 39 grams from the display – which by far was the most productive result he had experienced with an autoflowering strain indoors so far. He looks forward to growing Pandora also outdoors next spring, due to his fruitful Pandora indoor harvest believing that those 60-100 grams per plant stated by Paradise Seeds should easily be achievable then.

And also the high provided by Pandora proved to open up a new dimension of autoflowering strain potency to him. Her strong indica effect had a very quick onset, already after a few puffs from a fat Pandora joint, The Doc was wrapped in enduring stonedness that provided a pleasant warm “fluffy” feeling to him, raising some kind of green hope, indeed, causing deeply relieving relaxation in both body and mind, but not totally paralysing so that he was still able to move if necessary – and necessary it was very soon, as he heavily got the munchies from having smoked some Pandora and stood up to search around for sweeties in his kitchen, finding three 100 g chocolate bars that soon were a thing of the past. That effected lasted for about one and a half hour which The Doc regarded as pretty long for an autoflowering strain. He was also highly satisfied with the Pandora flavour that came over very sweet and smooth, the smoke was a sheer pleasure to inhale, not at all harsh or rough, with too much ruderalis influence, like it was the case with many autoflowering strains available on the market at the beginning of this trend a few years ago.

So altogether, The Doc was full of praise in any aspect about Pandora which, indeed, he considers one of the best autoflowering strains available on the market – while for him personally it was the best autoflowering experience so far.

Feminised Pandora seeds are available in units of 3 (26€), 5 (40€) or 10 (75€) seeds.

Green Born Identity – G.B.I.

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