Hey atony,welcome to GWE and to the smelly sticky world of growing your own mary!
The founders of GWE have had many experiences with cannabis growing and have written greatly detailed guides about all the questions you asked.Read the
Getting Started article and
Growing Cannabis Basics for the basic info and then for your seeds you can take a look at
Beginners Strains page that gives you an idea of how to choose a strain/seed. If you want to
Buy Seeds there are many online shops,some of which we all use and others that are less known but still get the job done without problems.
Since you are growing,there are some things you will often read/hear about. The most common is
Low Stress Training which allows you to pull and tie down your plant thus achieving bigger yields and easier handling of the canopy. You can also learn how to divide the power of the buds equally among them,reading the
Topping Guides will help with that!!
I believe with these articles and the amazingly helpful family of GWE you will soon be stoked by your abilities! Don't be afraid to ask questions,create a grow journal to keep us updated on your grow and read,read,read.There is no better teachers than experience but you can still smoke a bowl and read other's experiences to get basic knowledge of what you should do.
About the Autoflowering or Photoperiod plants,as a newbie i would recommend Photoperiod plants because they have more time to recover from whatever you do to them,they veg as long as you like and in most cases,photoperiod plants grown in the same conditions as autoflower plants will yield more due to bigger flowering times and the lack of Ruderalis genetics in them.
However if you do want to get autoflowers because they are faster (Unless you treat photoperiod plants with
12/12 from seed light schedule ) , there are autoflowers from Dinafem that have an XXL tag on their name.Those autoflowers do produce huge yields in comparison to their normal autoflower sisters. Decent yields and Potency are not treats of strains only,we are factor number 1 on the outcome of the plants .
Happy growing and keep it green buddy!