zem
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- Dec 6, 2009
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Hi all 
I have been battling with mites for more than a year now. Luckily, I had grown for 14 years with no encounter with this pest! So when it came, I was experienced enough to not allow it to kill my plants, but it did make me think and work a lot before I found my way to deal with them.
My biggest issue is that I don't want to fumigate anything that leaves any residues on my buds, not even organic residues. So my last grow, I chose to put the mites issue on top of my priorities. I knew that mites were on the floors and around my grow from the last grow. So first I adjusted my flowering table in a way to minimize the places of contact with walls and floor. I figured that the mites would have to zigzag up and down to find their way and the plants are in a flood and drain table so they would have to find points of contact with leaves to climb on the plants since they cannot cross the wet floor under the plants' pots.
Second thing I did was to timely and faithfully supercrop my plants before inducing flowering. This is one of the better more detailed videos that I found about supercropping . IMO this solved 90% of my issue, the mites lose their advantage of being unseen and they had to go to the well exposed leaves to start eating on the plants. I use organic potassium soap and spinosad. The soap kills on contact with no residual effect. The spinosad kills any worms and some growers claim that it helps with the mites but I am not sure about this. After 15-20 days into flowering, I stop fumigation and observe very closely as I position my colas. Any mites at this stage must be detected as early as possible and I remove them manually with a cloth and/or defoilation of infested leaves. Every plant must be fully and easily accessible. Throughout the flowering stage I detected mites about 8 to 10 times and cleaned them off. They were undetectable at harvest. Needless to say I took other obvious measures like disinfecting the growrocks and changing before going in especially from a possibly infested place like where I dried my infested plants... I even removed my oscillating fan that was in there when I had the severe infestation because I was sure there were mites inside of it. One day if I have to, I might get ozone to disinfect items but this is still unnecessary, I have to wait and see.
To sum it up, I placed the mites issue on top, and found that cleaning, timing and observation were sufficient to deal with my spider mites problem. I don't know about other growers, but I really dislike leaving any residue whatsoever on my buds. It could be harder for organic soil that cannot be disinfected, and for outdoor grows, but for similar indoor grows, this method could be a way to avoid contaminating your buds.
I have been battling with mites for more than a year now. Luckily, I had grown for 14 years with no encounter with this pest! So when it came, I was experienced enough to not allow it to kill my plants, but it did make me think and work a lot before I found my way to deal with them.
My biggest issue is that I don't want to fumigate anything that leaves any residues on my buds, not even organic residues. So my last grow, I chose to put the mites issue on top of my priorities. I knew that mites were on the floors and around my grow from the last grow. So first I adjusted my flowering table in a way to minimize the places of contact with walls and floor. I figured that the mites would have to zigzag up and down to find their way and the plants are in a flood and drain table so they would have to find points of contact with leaves to climb on the plants since they cannot cross the wet floor under the plants' pots.
Second thing I did was to timely and faithfully supercrop my plants before inducing flowering. This is one of the better more detailed videos that I found about supercropping . IMO this solved 90% of my issue, the mites lose their advantage of being unseen and they had to go to the well exposed leaves to start eating on the plants. I use organic potassium soap and spinosad. The soap kills on contact with no residual effect. The spinosad kills any worms and some growers claim that it helps with the mites but I am not sure about this. After 15-20 days into flowering, I stop fumigation and observe very closely as I position my colas. Any mites at this stage must be detected as early as possible and I remove them manually with a cloth and/or defoilation of infested leaves. Every plant must be fully and easily accessible. Throughout the flowering stage I detected mites about 8 to 10 times and cleaned them off. They were undetectable at harvest. Needless to say I took other obvious measures like disinfecting the growrocks and changing before going in especially from a possibly infested place like where I dried my infested plants... I even removed my oscillating fan that was in there when I had the severe infestation because I was sure there were mites inside of it. One day if I have to, I might get ozone to disinfect items but this is still unnecessary, I have to wait and see.
To sum it up, I placed the mites issue on top, and found that cleaning, timing and observation were sufficient to deal with my spider mites problem. I don't know about other growers, but I really dislike leaving any residue whatsoever on my buds. It could be harder for organic soil that cannot be disinfected, and for outdoor grows, but for similar indoor grows, this method could be a way to avoid contaminating your buds.
plants but i caught them early and killed them with water,soap,and alcohol mix.
