This is my first season, and I've learned a lot. First off, not all strains are created equal! Pretty obvious, no? But my experience is mostly from the bad old days when you had to know a guy who knew a guy and what you got was what you got. Most of it was never identified as to strain. "Tasty bud" was about as specific as you got, or maybe "from Garberville." I've have smoked in coffee houses and cannabis clubs in Europe, but on those occasions I was so generally amazed that such a thing as a cannabis club could exist that my eye for detail got set aside pretty early in those evenings.
So the profusion of strains is a bit of a wonderland for me. Add to that the fact that autos aren't very popular with my local grower/dispensaries (they hate autos because you can't profitably clone them) and so I don't have auto strains specifically adapted to my northern California climate. I've germinated about 15 different varieties this season (25 seeds in all and all but one auto) and 12 have or are expected to survive to adulthood. I've had one standout in terms of potency — a Fastbuds Pineapple Express, and another in terms of yield — Ultra Lemon Haze at about 3 oz.
As for how long to hold them, I do think I've wasted some time this season and probably degraded the quality of a couple of my earlier plants by leaving them unharvested for so long — waiting for amber trikes. So I'm refining how I interpret the state of the trikes.
So far, it's been well worth it — and I still have 8 plants in various stages of growth out back, and just about enough summer left to finish them off.