I'm going to share a true story ... this involves WPM and not spidermites. It also underscores the need to take these sanitary SOP's seriously. I had outdoor plants. I started indoor plants. For over a month I followed proper sanitary protocol ... washing up, changing shoes/clothes before entering the inside grow area. I had a senior moment one day after clearing out the rest of my already harvested outdoor plants. I forgot to wash up and transferred the WPM indoors. To get rid of it took a complete shutdown of the indoor grow. Pitching the infected plants and starting over after a complete cleaning and sanitation routine.
Please don't be the one to repeat my mistake. You can use chemical insecticides on surfaces around the perimeter of your tent. Just don't use the chemicals on live plants.
For me it was my 2nd closet grow ever.....1988. I had already tried using this "Phototron" thing, a self-contained unit that looked like a 3ft tall lantern. I placed it in the back bedroom of our apartment....They promised "perpetual buds". It had many verticle flourescent tubes and reflectors so the plants inside, which you had to basically bonsai, would be surrounded with light. With all of this the plants inside would produce "endless" little buds that filled the unit.
It was more of a gimmick than reality. The plants would stretch too much, there was no actual drainage, not enough actual light energy.......what it was good for was as a seedling starter. I quickly abandoned using the Phototron by itself and bought a 400w metal halide that I hung in a 4' x 3' closet in the same bedroom with the phototron now outside the closet to grow seedlings to rotate in. The first grow went great.
Something looked a little weird about the plants during the 2nd grow. They looked unhealthy, the leaves started looking bad, dried out.......I was already reading High Times magazine and the classic grow books. But I never expected this. I looked in real close......webbing! What the......I look even closer......dots......moving!! I was really taken aback because this was a closet in a bedroom in a New York City brick apartment building, 10 floors up...how the hell did this happen?? Did they crawl up the side of the building? Probably not. Something I brought in, probably soil, not that it couldn't be other things.....
Now I caught up with my learning about spider mites. Of all the things I was learning, learning about what could go wrong.....I never thought it would be spider mites. Needless to say I looked into solutions. I tried some diluted spray, sprayed the heck out of them......more than once. Each time, a few days later.......spider mites. The only real solution was to cut everything down, clean, sanitize, and start over. I made sure I never had spider mites again.
