Got bugs! Now what do I do?

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BigBlonde

BigBlonde

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I'm sure the crop is lost. We chopped the plants and put them in big plastic bags. Then we hung them in the tent. That was what my wife wanted to do. I was going to put them in the trash. I doubt they'll dry well in the bags, though. I just hope we didn't give the pests just what they like most.

I don't know what those orange bugs are for sure, but searching the web indicated they are another type of spider mite. They're definitely hungry. I could almost see the leaves disappear. They could eat half a leaf in about an hour and were spreading so fast that controlling them was hopeless, in my opinion. I suspect I wasn't aggressive enough in controlling them and they adapted and became even more voracious and harder to kill.

Hope it works out for you
Thanks. We'll just hope we have better luck next time.

I suspect those critters have already found their way throughout your house.ā˜¹ļø
I hope not. The growing room isn't attached to the house. We have Orkin service, too, but the guy who does the work here says they're really hard to kill. We going to get serious about getting rid of them in the growing room. We decided it's time for chemical warfare.

They also cannot survive without plants to eat and we don't have any other plants in the room or in the house. So any that hatch won't live very long. My concern is the eggs. They're only viable for 2 to 4 weeks. I think they can go dormant, though, and wake up much later. That's why we'll have to use chemicals. The wife doesn't want to use neem oil. We might use pest strips.

I use green cleaner and a fog master jr. Best setup there is and have gotten rid of my pests when the pump sprayer wouldnā€™t. Highly recommend this combo

I had spider mites my last grow and thrips on a few. This handled them. And you can use it up until harvest.

Now I just use it weekly at a low dose and no issues. I use it up until week 6-7 of flower. The fog master jr also makes it so you save whatever youā€™re using. Itā€™s very efficient. Iā€™d go through way more using a lump sprayer and it didnā€™t work even 1/2 as good
That's a good point about regular treatments. I'm sure doing something like that is in our future.
 
PerfecTrader

PerfecTrader

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Ahh man ā˜¹ terribly sorry to have caught up on your grow just to have it pested. If you were anywhere near AZ I would for sure gift you some plants.
Whelp at least you learned alot. Tell the wifey the Farm said it is time for "Operation IPM(integrated pest management)" and next grow you will be ready.
Were you in soil or some sort of dwc?
 
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geemonty

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I got spidermites from bringing home a houseplant from walmart. Plant was a week from flip so I refused to let it go and tried to save it. This is just my experience and thoughts on trying to save my plant with mite infestation.

What I did was take it outside everyday for a week and spray the entire plants with a fairly strong shower on my garden house sprayhead to knock off as many as possible. I would let it dry then apply a treatment I found online. It seemed to work but they always came back. I had the plant isolated and it did not infect my other plants. After the showers I would spray every 3 days with the same treatment. I had to let it recover in veg so it added time to grow and plant ended up getting irreversibly worse overtime but I did end up harvesting it. I haven't weighed it yet but rough estimate from other grows I think I might get 50g which is only 75% of what I normally get from this strain and setup. I haven't tested the quality yet but it wasn't very sticky so its probably trash.

Cost to run grow light, fans, the cost of the treatments, the extra precautions I took and the risk of infecting my other plants in hindsight was not worth it. If I would have trashed it immediately and just started fresh I would have been better off. Unless there is something I could do different I would advise anyone with a plant in veg to just destroy it and start over. I also used the 3 bucket method of bud washing using vinegar and baking soda to clean off dead mites, eggs etc. All in all not worth it other than for a personal learning experience.

With that said start a regular IPM schedule(I did not do this before) you probably wont have to worry about other plants being infected at least I didn't but I might have just been lucky.

EDIT: Gynura Aurantiaca is the plant I brought my mites home in. The leaves are fuzzy and some internet searches confirm that mites love these plants which are now pretty common in big box plant section. Be careful with these.
 
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BigBlonde

BigBlonde

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I got spidermites from bringing home a houseplant from walmart. Plant was a week from flip so I refused to let it go and tried to save it. This is just my experience and thoughts on trying to save my plant with mite infestation.

What I did was take it outside everyday for a week and spray the entire plants with a fairly strong shower on my garden house sprayhead to knock off as many as possible. I would let it dry then apply a treatment I found online. It seemed to work but they always came back. I had the plant isolated and it did not infect my other plants. After the showers I would spray every 3 days with the same treatment. I had to let it recover in veg so it added time to grow and plant ended up getting irreversibly worse overtime but I did end up harvesting it. I haven't weighed it yet but rough estimate from other grows I think I might get 50g which is only 75% of what I normally get from this strain and setup. I haven't tested the quality yet but it wasn't very sticky so its probably trash.

Cost to run grow light, fans, the cost of the treatments, the extra precautions I took and the risk of infecting my other plants in hindsight was not worth it. If I would have trashed it immediately and just started fresh I would have been better off. Unless there is something I could do different I would advise anyone with a plant in veg to just destroy it and start over. I also used the 3 bucket method of bud washing using vinegar and baking soda to clean off dead mites, eggs etc. All in all not worth it other than for a personal learning experience.

With that said start a regular IPM schedule(I did not do this before) you probably wont have to worry about other plants being infected at least I didn't but I might have just been lucky.

EDIT: Gynura Aurantiaca is the plant I brought my mites home in. The leaves are fuzzy and some internet searches confirm that mites love these plants which are now pretty common in big box plant section. Be careful with these.
We think the spider mites made their way into our tent because I set the plants outside during a two-day power outage. I might have been better off leaving them in the dark. We have a battery backup for our lights, but it couldn't make it through the first day with the lights at 25% power.

Even though we learned a lot about spider mites during this first contact with them, we ultimately quit trying to grow our plants to maturity. We cut them and put them in black plastic bags. They've been hanging inside the bags in the tent for about a week. I think they should be trashed, but my wife has hopes of getting something from them.

What we learned and what we believe led to our defeat is that spider mites adapt quickly to whatever is being used to kill them. We didn't know that until it was too late. They evolved into a resilient and more voracious version of themselves. We only used hydrogen peroxide at first, which will kill many of them and make it appear as if it's working. It isn't, however, and the survivors are even harder to kill. So, the best thing to do is hit them hard with everything available--hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, neem oil (maybe), no pest strips, Azamax (if available, we couldn't get it here), Spinosad, diatomaceous earth, etc. They can supposedly be sprayed off plants with water, but we didn't want to take them outside to do it. I understand they can be drowned by immersing the plants in water, but we didn't have a way to do it.

So, even though we're discouraged and sad to lose our first crop, we'll soon start our next grow: Grow #2 - Barney's Farm Acapulco Gold Feminized
 
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geemonty

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We think the spider mites made their way into our tent because I set the plants outside during a two-day power outage. I might have been better off leaving them in the dark. We have a battery backup for our lights, but it couldn't make it through the first day with the lights at 25% power.

Even though we learned a lot about spider mites during this first contact with them, we ultimately quit trying to grow our plants to maturity. We cut them and put them in black plastic bags. They've been hanging inside the bags in the tent for about a week. I think they should be trashed, but my wife has hopes of getting something from them.

What we learned and what we believe led to our defeat is that spider mites adapt quickly to whatever is being used to kill them. We didn't know that until it was too late. They evolved into a resilient and more voracious version of themselves. We only used hydrogen peroxide at first, which will kill many of them and make it appear as if it's working. It isn't, however, and the survivors are even harder to kill. So, the best thing to do is hit them hard with everything available--hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, neem oil (maybe), no pest strips, Azamax (if available, we couldn't get it here), Spinosad, diatomaceous earth, etc. They can supposedly be sprayed off plants with water, but we didn't want to take them outside to do it. I understand they can be drowned by immersing the plants in water, but we didn't have a way to do it.

So, even though we're discouraged and sad to lose our first crop, we'll soon start our next grow: Grow #2 - Barney's Farm Acapulco Gold Feminized
Yeah I never got rid of them either. I use a combination or h202, IP alcohol, and castile soap with tea tree oil and peppermint oil. They never got out of control so long as I sprayed every 2-3 days but they would do enough damage that the plant was almost dead by the time I harvested. GL with your next grow.
 
BigBlonde

BigBlonde

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Yeah I never got rid of them either. I use a combination or h202, IP alcohol, and castile soap with tea tree oil and peppermint oil. They never got out of control so long as I sprayed every 2-3 days but they would do enough damage that the plant was almost dead by the time I harvested. GL with your next grow.
We think we'll be okay for the next grow. We will be using a different tent and will have it in a different room. In the meantime we'll do what we can to kill them all in the infested room. We probably won't be using that room again for a long time.
 
RootsRuler

RootsRuler

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BB,

I suggest you do the following......If your room doesn't have fabrics or carpets like a bedroom or something that can be stained the best way to clean your room of mites and other harmful insects would be to bleach it down. That means every surface of your room and every crevice you can find where they can hide. After you bleach it, or if you can't bleach, bomb the room with a Pyrethrum based fogger like Doktor Doom. If you can't bleach I would bomb, wait 3 days and rebomb. This should kill off most of mites along with whatever eggs that hatch after the first bomb. This should be sufficient in cleaning the room to a level where they won't be an issue. Size of the room matters when it comes to how many bombs you need to set off for maximum coverage.

Of course the best way to prevent this is to be proactive in adhering to strict cleanliness protocols. I have a canvas jumpsuit that I put on over my streetclothes along with some slip on Vans sneakers that I leave outside the door of the room. I also put on a baseball cap so that I don't let in any unwanted hitchhikers infesting my crops along with the jumpsuit and shoes. I wash the jumpsuit, shoes and cap at least once a week and spray with a solution of Azamax before I enter the room everytime I enter the room. Maybe it's overkill but when you're trying to manage a large crop of infected plants it doesn't seem so extreme.

I had this happen to me when I was working for a licensed grow op in California. The Op had 6 Bloom rooms with 40 lights in each room. Each room held approximately 420 plants(Weird how that worked out!šŸ™ƒ). A team of 3 people managed everything needed for that stage for each room. I was assigned to one of those rooms. The op was well designed with air curtains at the entrance to each room along with our having to use Tyvek suits and caps before entering that area. Even with all those protocols in place we somehow got a mite infestation in the room. Thankfully we had hand held foggers(The Fog Master Jr, as was mentioned, is a great investment and an excellent applicator!), P100 respirators and the plants were on pivot tables but it took the entire shift between the 3 of us to be able to get coverage on all those plants. We had to repeat application 2 more times. The owner of the Op used Azamax as their choice of insecticides and it worked well. I noticed that, depending on the level of infestation, 2 applications was all that was really needed to control them.

Stay away from any insecticide/miticide that contains:

Abamectin - used in a product called Avid
Myclobutanil - used in a product called Eagle 20
Bifenazate - used in a product called Floramite
Spiromesifen - used in products called Oberon and Forbid
Chlorfenapyr - used in a product called Pylon

All of these chemicals are harmful to humans.
 
PerfecTrader

PerfecTrader

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Damnn hard not to read this thread and feel like you either have mites and don't know it or you just don't have them yet but can't and won't be avoiding them šŸ˜‚ I'm scared tbh
 
RootsRuler

RootsRuler

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Damnn hard not to read this thread and feel like you either have mites and don't know it or you just don't have them yet but can't and won't be avoiding them šŸ˜‚ I'm scared tbh
Vigilance and Discipline in your safety protocols. That's all you need to avoid getting an out of control infestation. Check EVERY plant at different areas to make sure you catch them as early as you can. Use a loupe. Mites are almost undetectable to the naked eye and when you do see them it's probably almost too late.

I like to add a little Azamax to my feed water as a preventative measure so that if those little F'ers do get in the moment they start sucking the sap out of the branch they've signed their death warrant!!! It also kills off whatever eggs and mites may be in the soil but it won't kill off any eggs. I also do periodic spray downs for that reason.
 
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PerfecTrader

PerfecTrader

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Vigilance and Discipline in your safety protocols. That's all you need to avoid getting an out of control infestation. Check EVERY plant at different areas to make sure you catch them as early as you can. Use a loupe. Mites are almost undetectable to the naked eye and when you do see them it's probably almost too late.

I like to add a little Azamax to my feed water as a preventative measure so that if those little F'ers do get in the moment they start sucking the sap out of the branch they've signed their death warrant!!! It also kills off whatever eggs and mites may be in the soil but it won't kill off any eggs. I also do periodic spray downs for that reason.
Great advice and I may need to grab some of that and also trifecta just to have on hand. I hate to say it but for me a bad mite infestation would likely be the end of my growing all together. I could just imagine not ever being able to fully rid the room my tents are in and wouldn't want to bomb my house with anything due to my dogs. I just have to be extra vigilant like you said. I actually have seen 1 small bug in my tent but it appeared to be because I let some run-off sit for too long. Looked like small fruit fly or gnat on outside of fabric pot. I squished and shop vacced the run-off and cleaned the drainage as best I could. Haven't seen anything else but if you have mites and don't catch them, won't you see leaf damage? If you don't have leaf damage then you likely don't have an infestation correct?
 
RootsRuler

RootsRuler

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Great advice and I may need to grab some of that and also trifecta just to have on hand. I hate to say it but for me a bad mite infestation would likely be the end of my growing all together. I could just imagine not ever being able to fully rid the room my tents are in and wouldn't want to bomb my house with anything due to my dogs. I just have to be extra vigilant like you said. I actually have seen 1 small bug in my tent but it appeared to be because I let some run-off sit for too long. Looked like small fruit fly or gnat on outside of fabric pot. I squished and shop vacced the run-off and cleaned the drainage as best I could. Haven't seen anything else but if you have mites and don't catch them, won't you see leaf damage? If you don't have leaf damage then you likely don't have an infestation correct?
LOL! It's not that bad. There are many effective ways of controlling them. Like PM I'm sure you have some right now in your tent. The difference is CG and you have been able to grow some very healthy plants. SM's have a harder time boring through the stems of healthy plants. One of the reasons I use silica in my feedwater. To fortify the cellular structure of the foliage so that they get discouraged and leave. Just keep doing what you're doing and you should be fine. Vigilance. That will save the day.

If you do find SM's I would suggest Azamax as a solution. Most commercial ops use it since it's a derivative of Neem Oil so it's not harmful to humans. It is an extract so it should still be handled with caution and never applied less than 14 days before harvest but it's pretty safe for the most part.

SM's like hot environments. They don't like air movement. Good circulating fans help in keeping them from breeding. CG's been instructing you to drop humidity and temp to pull more oils into your flower. Those lower temps and humidity are also deterring SM's from breeding at a rate that is unmanageable.

SM's bore into stems and branches to suck out the sap that the plant uses to feed itself. In essence what they do is starve your plant to the point that they die. They can also feed off leaves but they prefer tapping into a main artery. You may or may not see leaf damage but ALWAYS check underneath leaves as that is their favorite place to lay eggs. Too many times I've heard complaints from people who say this or that product didn't do sheet when the real problem is they didn't apply it correctly. FULL saturation of the plant and soil is necessary if you want to take care of your problem.
 
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geemonty

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Haven't seen anything else but if you have mites and don't catch them, won't you see leaf damage? If you don't have leaf damage then you likely don't have an infestation correct?
I have only had them the once but this is how it happened for me. I was planning on taking cuttings for an outside grow so I checked the plant and planned the cuts a little but it was late on a Friday night so I put it off until next day. So I get everything ready the next day to do this, sterilized tools and got my clone stuff ready put on my gloves.... I walk into grow room and the plant looked like it was dying and there were webs everywhere. The night before plant looked healthy I hadn't seen any signs of mites. In less than 24 hours they just absolutely destroyed the plant. I lost more than half the leaves to the mites.
 
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RootsRuler

RootsRuler

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263
I have only had them the once but this is how it happened for me. I was planning on taking cuttings for an outside grow so I checked the plant and planned the cuts a little but it was late on a Friday night so I put it off until next day. So I get everything ready the next day to do this, sterilized tools and got my clone stuff ready put on my gloves.... I walk into grow room and the plant looked like it was dying and there were webs everywhere. The night before plant looked healthy I hadn't seen any signs of mites. In less than 24 hours they just absolutely destroyed the plant. I lost more than half the leaves to the mites.
Had an ex GF call me one day asking me to come over to her place. I was really hesitant because I thought she was trying to booty call me but she offered me unlimited margaritas and a hot plate of enchiladas! Can't pass that up!šŸ˜›

When I got there she took my hand and led me towards her bedroom!(OH GOOD GOD! How do I get out of this?). The moment I entered the room I saw a 4 x 4 tent! LOL!

She told me that she had watched and learned all the stuff I did when I grew weed for us and she missed the chronic I grew since the Dispensary weed was crap! She said she was having a little problem that she had never seen in any of my grows and wanted me to figure out what was going on. The moment she opened the tent I saw a canopy of webs!!

I told her to grab her shears, cut them all down, bleach out the tent, bomb the room and start over........
 
stonymcpothead

stonymcpothead

26
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Had an ex GF call me one day asking me to come over to her place. I was really hesitant because I thought she was trying to booty call me but she offered me unlimited margaritas and a hot plate of enchiladas. When I got there she took my hand and led me towards her bedroom!(OH GOOD GOD! How do I get out of this?). The moment I entered the room I saw a 4 x 4 tent! LOL!

She told me that she had watched and learned all the stuff I did when I grew weed for us and she missed the chronic I grew since the Dispensary weed was crap! She said she was having a little problem that she had never seen in any of my grows and wanted me to figure out what was going on. The moment she opened the tent I saw a canopy of webs!!

I told her to grab her shears, cut them all down, bleach out the tent and bomb the room and start over........
You sir made my morning.
 
Buzzzz

Buzzzz

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Hey Bigblonde ,i dont want to be the bearer of bad news ,,,,, but mites are a nightmare and a formidable opponent , i dont think hydrogen peroxide is gonna cut it ,i like to hit em with neem oil then go nuclear as i get more frustrated ,thats only if the plants are worth the energy ,in other cases ill just trash the grow and super clean up
I bet the eggs last a lot lot longer. I have had mites,destroyed the crop,fumigated and not grown for an entire summer, started again from seeds,new pots,medium, and had them again. It seems they go dormant until a new crop comes.
 
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geemonty

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I bet the eggs last a lot lot longer. I have had mites,destroyed the crop,fumigated and not grown for an entire summer, started again from seeds,new pots,medium, and had them again. It seems they go dormant until a new crop comes.
I moved my infested plant to a new area and still growing new plants in the original room. I have not had any on these plants growing in the main room w/o any fumigation of the room or anything like that. Maybe because I grow with DWC? The room even has carpet for them to hide and its been 4 months since I noticed the infestation. There are 2 plants growing in the same spot the infested one was in. Should I be more worried than I am LOL.
 

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