Did the Merit ruin the weed or was it the damage from the RA's?
I had the same thing......larf city....lol.....I attributed it to super damaged roots. Not the merit, definitely...I never used Merit on my shitty crop.
I do not attribute problems to the M75 other than lasting too long in plant tissues, and I cannot find that it's appropriate to use even on tobacco, let alone field tobacco (closest corollary I can think of).
I discovered cuttings and babies with RA's were unaffected by Merit. Older plants with bigger root systems, that had been ravaged by the RA's and were sloooooowww to recover.
Mine didn't recover, ever. Nor did any subsequent cuts. I am sure that my husbandry skills have a ways to go, but I feel that the original outdoor plants should have been in good enough conditions to withstand the original infestation--they were not able to withstand it. I feel, therefore, that once the RAs got a sufficient foothold they were able to decimate the plant's ability to fight further infection/infestation. Like a plant AIDS, if you will.
I didn't use the Merit in flower. I dealt with them after I chopped on an upcoming run of teens and a room full of moms.
I put
smart pots in flood tables and filled them with Merit and let the SIT for a long time....every square inch of soil must be saturated...
This was my method with the Triazicide. However, I'd rather use something that doesn't present the potential for problems up and downstream, as well as creating resistance, that products such as Merit 75 present for me.
Merit works on animals with central nervous systems....period. I dont think there is an RA without a nervous system. I dont know this to be true though. I am no bug man!!
This may be why nicotinoid 'cides' are proving so problematic. They have no place in my garden.
Pesticide pathways and pathway resistence is where this conversation needs to go, IMHO. We as potheads, aren't dealing with a new bug. These things have been researched by Ag companies and universities.
Its hard as a home gardener to be able to correctly ID all these types of bugs. If we ever get infected...we hope its ONCE....the IPM gets tightened up, and no more problems. Who wants to be an expert at THIS shit?!?...lol....NOBODY!!!
They have indeed, and I think we need to use our skulls to find the proper corollaries, i.e. what would be smoked, not necessarily just 'ingested', if you will. In other words, look to how good tobacco is grown (is there anything else that's labeled and smoked, not eaten or made into juice, other products?).
However! If the home gardener takes a more holistic approach, in my opinion, if a home gardener pays better attention to the balance of the whole suite of organisms to which we and our plants are exposed, and if that gardener foments and promulgates that healthy culture (Chobble's mention of Cap's bennies, that's where he's leading), then the whole problem may be avoided.
I say this because at the very same time my perlite hempy tubs were becoming Dens of Winged Destruction (outside, high balcony), my soil food web plants became my saving grace. I had to question,
Why was that? My immediate conclusion was the medium itself, and it being established and more conducive to a more complete soil food web than the disconnected perlite hempy tubs, which were being fed a combination of chemical salt and organic nutrients at low concentrations.[/quote]
