This is my first veg to harvest cannabis plant. Have learned a gazillion things but definitely have a gazillion more to learn.
Today it’s dealing with a LOT of Thrips. This plant came in from outside and it’s been inside for about 27 days (absolutely got them outside). To try and resolve this I’ve ordered 3 different bio controls:
Orius insidiosus - attacks all mobile stages
Neoseiulus cucumeris - targets young larval stages
Stratiolaelaps scimitus - eats **thrips pupae
**
Is there anything I’m missing from this plan? Trying to avoid anything that could affect the flower/taste/trichomes. Athena IPM or Lost Coast Plant Therapy?
Will this pest screw up my plant in the long term results? She’s been kept amazingly healthy despite the pests. I was planning to enter her in a contest coming up soon, but I’m worried these pest will compromise the buds?
Did take a bunch of clones and they have the Thrips too. Spent a couple hours cleaning any visible larvae with a bit of water and qtip. Cleaned each leaf surgically. Bottom and top. Then went back and removed any that had appeared. Obviously there are more there but I have safers insecticidal soap and I’ve given them a solid spray but plan to give them another one today (skipped yesterday as it was a water day).
There’s lots of clone dip products. Dr Zymes is decent. There’s another I have used called Flying Skull that is supposed to deter bugs.
The suds from Dawn dish soap are like a nuke to any bugs, just not the eggs. If you spray a hose into a bucket to make foam, you can then massage it onto the plant. The foam has much better coverage than the spray. Importantly, wash it off right away with water. If you had a big bin, you could wrap a plastic bag around the root ball and dunk the whole plant.
Ipm up to week 3! Then you can utilize lost coast till week 6-7 safely imo. But make a dunk tank in a 55gal and set ipm at 90-120ml per gal that you add in of water. This will be essentially the Nuke ratio. Add in a dish soap or dr bronners hemp peppermint Castile soap that way you stay organic and will add an extra essential oil. Homogenized the solution and allow for saponins to create an emulsion of foam making the solution stick while being applied and then suffocates all the remaining pests.
You will however need to do a full knockdown style ipm spraying to ensure you keep those fuckers down and gone.
@Autumn_Ridge_Hemp is that flying skull one called “nuke em” ? I had a buddy run it on some plants he was giving me cause he was thinking he could use it to control his issues and it’s probably the worst smelling stuff I’ve seen an he used it for a foliar and drench. I think it took maybe a full 3 months of clean water drench to finally rinse all that shit out of the soil of this one plant
Yeah, it’s Nuke ‘em. I pulled out the bottle to smell it just now, and it doesn’t smell like much of anything. Maybe he had a bad batch or it was reacting with something else. I haven’t used it as a soil drench. It’s chalky and reminds me a little of diluted latex paint.
I never got to smell it in the bottle but yeah I know he mixed it with fish fertz too so maybe it had a bad reaction to the enzymes. But this thing had the smell of death for a mi Ute but was one of the most flourishing plants in the garden. Thankfully it stayed in its own pot just incase it had any type of rot of some shit it wasn’t being passed around. But yeah the plant itself did well, he unfortunately also made a custom mix of desert sand and soil which definitely didn’t help drainage till I started an automation cycle on it and aerated the roots
I have dealt with Thrips over the years. The best way I have discovered is by using nematodes. Thrips have five stages of life, nematodes wipe them out in the larval stage when in the growing medium eating root matter. Introduce nematodes once a month and younwill never have a Thrip issue again, or fungus gnats or any other pest that has a life stage in the growing medium.
