TheTrueShangsta

Soo I have a friend who's currently flowering some speed queen and Kush in an old closet. They are under 140w of HPS, and about 100w of combined cfl and should be finishing up in 2-3weeks. She's (I'm helping) also in the process of building a flower cab so that the closet can be used as a veg space.

She has been battling pests in the closet since they were originally put into there to veg. At first it was thousands (literally, THOUSANDS) of fungus gnats, which at my advice, she eradicated using an arsenal of Neem oil and sticky traps. It was pretty bad, to a point where the closet could turn a yellow pest strip into a completely black strip in about 48 hours...

After about a 2 month all out war with the gnats during the plants veg cycle, they retreated and have not been seen since. (she was holding off flowering until the gnats were gone, and started flowering as soon as they disappeared) Victory!!!! or so she thought.........

About a week or 2 later, spider mites started showing up....in substantial numbers. Before she could do anything about it, nearly all of the fan leaves on all 3 plants were speckled and spotted all over. She didn't know what was wrong and thought her PH was off or it was heat stress....As soon as I saw it, I pulled back one of the leaves and sure enough, a bunch of little dark spider mites crawling around, and even more white eggs along the leaf veins. There were even some webs starting on lower popcorn buds.

We immediately put the plants in the bathroom, and gave them a warm shower, followed by a pretty good application of K+Neem. They were allowed to dry for an hour or so, and were put back into the closet. Things went well for a couple days....until she gave me a call saying that the critters had returned. I went over, we gave the 3 girls a shower once again, and this time after the shower we spent a couple hours rubbing down each leaf, finger for finger, in hopes of crushing any remaining mites or eggs. This was followed by a dilluted foilar spray of foxfarms "dont bug me", dried, and applied a very watered down K+neem solution before being put back into the closet.

The guy at the hydro store said the DBM was more of a killer than a preventiive, and could cause burns on flowering plants, so to avoid using it as much as possible, and water it down a lot.....So we did. Well, the day after the plants started exhibiting some stressed behaviour...leaves curling down, brown tips, red veins....She took them out one more time, gave them a watered down neem spray again, and a good soil flush. The leaves seemed to do better within a couple days of that.

BY THE WAY, each time the plants were taken out of the closet, the closet itself was wiped down with a bleach solution and cleaned pretty thouroughly before returning the plants.

So all that seemed to get rid of most of them, but not all....She still has to crush about 10-20 from the undersides of the leaves each time she checks on the plants...she has only seem a web once since then, and no serious damage has been done other than mass leaf spotting.....they do seem to be low on N and yellowing leaves, but at this point she's not really introducing any more nutes, just gonna blast them with mollasses and flush them.

Recently though, she's been telling me that she sees more and more, and that they seem to "hide" when she opens the closet door, and literally running from her fingers, sometimes into the buds and escape from her.

She's mostly worried about them eating the buds or diminishing potency. What I'm basically wondering is what can be done to kill them at this point, and is there a point that if I see x number of mites per sq inch or on each budsite, that it's better to call it a day and chop at?? In other words, how bad is it to have a spider mite infestation (controlled, I would say) during the crucial last weeks of flowering? And also, is it neccessary to worry about the mites after chop, like during drying or curing can any living mites still do damage to dead plant matter, or is it basically just...we might smoke mites?

Sorry for the long post-thanks in advance
shangsta

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SpankyMcLankey

that's fucking disgusting. use common sense jesus christ.

TheTrueShangsta

common sense as far as.........

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SpankyMcLankey

smoking bugs just to get high?

SpankyMcLankey

it won't kill you but chances are it would make myself puke.

TheTrueShangsta

LOL.....damn, that's all you got out of my long ass post?


to clarify......

Is there a point of pest saturation where it's better to chop and take the losses on the yield, will the mites hurt the buds at this point?

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SpankyMcLankey

you have to count them by the leaf. i personally would throw out any plant that has more than 5 easily visible mites per leaf. there's many more eggs and babies that you can't see with your eyes though. once there gets to over 40 mites per leaf they start to go to other leaves and plants. it's not uncommon for a mite to spend it's ENTIRE life on one leaf. so personally, when I know they are traveling to more leaves, if you don't do something QUICK you will lose the battle.


I don't know what your life style is TTS, or what your goal is, but I want only the best. If that means I have to throw 3 months of growing away to start over, I would. It's my own personal hygiene I care about, I don't want to fucking smoke dead bugs. If you're selling the weed, that's another story. Get it?


To me it sounds like you lost the battle a long time ago personally.
Even though you can't see it, the inside of your buds look like this...

TheTrueShangsta

Thanks for the post.

See the thing is, what I don't understand is....how could the inside of the buds be affected like that, if the buds were inspected daily since flowering began.....Remember, I said webbing was only found twice and it was in no way similar to the webbing in your pic...It was a sinlge string of web the mite was suspended on that was from one leaf to another.....in other words, if no mites have been seen on the buds each day...and no webs are present.... how could the "inside" of the bud be housing living mites???

Let me put it this way.....there are certainly not mites on every single leaf, there are however...about 5 per leaf on the leaves that are affected....hope you didn't think I meant 10-20 per leaf because that's definitely not the case. To be honest everything except the fan leaves look great, a lot better than I would expect under the amount of lighting and the low fert regimine.....And I do have a fair amount of grow experience IMO....

There has only been a small number of mites seen on the actual buds or stuck in trichomes....probabl y less than 10 seen since flowering began. And with such constant monitoring (about 3x per day) i guess I dont quite see how they can be residing "inside" the buds.......I guess we'll just keep fightingthem off for a few more weeks and see if theres mites inside when it's all dry and ready to be broken up.


Question- what effect can mites have on drying buds? Do they continue to feed on the buds after harvest....say if a couple are missed during trimming and remain on the stalk of a branch.....will they just die off or will they eat the trichomes orrrrrr what? is there some technique out there for ridding freshly cut buds of mites before drying?

The bud won't be sold, and I also strive for the best. I think there is a bit of confusion here, as I definitely don't think the battle has been lost.....don't get me wrong I don't think i've won yet but I def don't think it's been lost.

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TheTrueShangsta

BTW- not that I hope to or are planning on smoking many dead bugs.....but does anyone have info on health effects of doing so??

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Captain Cannabis

gross. i would probably finish the grow and paranoidly inspect every bud i plan to smoke for microscopic traces of insect life or waste.

i would also probably count on the whole harvest being botched

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Mafoo

^ Yah

i say no sense in chopping it now, worst case secenario is that the final product is not usable. you could probably still use it for making butter or something as long as the mites arent inside the nugs.

good luck, that sucks to have the greedy pests ruin your babies

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PLUR
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return

SpankyMcLankey

dog, if you find webbing at all, it's beyond the point of now return.

SpankyMcLankey

TTS, some times I think you're a troll.

I mean seriously you tell us this...

then you ask us for serious advice?

farmergiles

OK, ok this is not Sparta.

The mites in those photos are scaring me (hides behind sofa).

But seriously the most important thing is to prevent any further crops becoming infested- sounds like this one may have gone too far.

The grow space needs emptying and all traces of spider mite eradicating before any further growing takes place.

Also beware of spreading them if you ever visit any other grows.

Spider mites are either spread from one grow to the next via plants or on people's clothes. They can also be picked up from outdoors on clothing. Don't go for a walk in the woods or scrub and then go to the growroom- change clothes and shower first. Dogs and cats can also carry mites in from outdoors.

Ladybugs will help control an infestation if introduced at an early point. Good ventilation and circulation of air helps. Neem oil helps. You can get predator mites to eat the spider mites.

Be aware that even if you kill a whole generation of mites you may not stop the next generation hatching out a little later.

Good luck.

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stoneric

I'd be surprised if they could cause any harm. Fuck it, I'd smoke dogshit if it gave me a buzz and didn't have any negative health effects. I'd smoke dead bugs exclusively with no bud involved if it gave me a buzz and didn't cause any negative health effects. Some cultures eat bugs as a staple to their diets. Again, fuck it.

farmergiles

The captain makes a good point here- the wastes from the mites will fuck the product up, quite apart from anything else. Smoking mite shit.

Unfortunately I've never heard of a good way to use mite infested weed. Making oil might work.

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TheTrueShangsta

LOL, yea dude...Im a troll. Been here since before you but...yup you got me


If you would have continued to read beyond that point, you would have realized I was talking about a previous FUNGUS GNAT infestation that truely was in the THOUSANDS and were defeated.

You haven't been much help at all and have said nothing productive to me so far man, You can grow some good weed but when it comes to advice, you dont do much good.


As for FG and everyone else who had something usefull to say, thanks for your posts. I think I must have made the wrong impression with my original post though....Again, this isn't my personal grow but I think you guys are definitely under the wrong impression.....I appreciate your opinions but I think in a few weeks I'll just post pics of the harvest up.....cuz these buds (saw them today) are definitely not a lost cause....

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SpankyMcLankey

little do you know this wasn't my first account. looks like you're the noob now.

I guess my old account was like july 2006. looks like you may have won the battle, but you have not won the war. or at least, the war on your shitty buds, pun intended.

TheTrueShangsta

LOL, so you have multiple accounts and I'm the troll right?


Unfortunately, you guys may be right....Up to this point I was thinking we could beat the mites,but I went back over there today and the situation is worse than ever...about 10 mites per leaf now. (still not every single leaf, not even a majority of leaves, but many)

The earliest finishing strain has about 2 weeks left and the other one has about 3 weeks left..........I'm going to get some K+neem right now, and then we're going to wage a last stand......See if we can kill enough of them off to last at least another week in hopes of increasing yield a bit.

I still don't think the inside of the buds are affected, but I guess I can't say for sure.

I figure if we cut most of the fan leaves off which the mites live on (not the smaller leaves near the buds, like I said, the buds dont seem to be affected much, a mite here or there..) then maybe the mites wont ever get the chance to progress into the buds? Plus, we can try out that old method of heavy pruning near harvest to stress the plant and produce more resins......Personal ly, I never believed in all that and think that the plant needs its leaves but if it will get rid of the mites, it's worth a shot.

Don't get me wrong, I definitely think this mite problem and its solutions will diminish overall yield.....but we definitely want these buds to ripen a bit more before just choppin.....About 75% of trichomes are still relatively clear. I think one more week of victorious battle with these damn bugs is possible,2 more is pushin it.

We shall see...

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Captain Cannabis

Gross.

Pics?

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