anyone ever lose a crop to gnats?

hey bro only advice i have for you is to not attempt to grow anything else until you get rid of all them fuckers. just one can lay 100 eggs in 2 weeks. they dont harm mature plants but none of your seedlings or clones are going to survive. add a half inch of sand on topsoil burrying the maggots in the soil, let soil dry out and dont leave open water anywhere. last - buy some fly paper.

That looks nasty. Almost as bad as caterpillar poop. Luckily fungus gnats aren't as bad as caterpillars. With your corrupted bud as soon as you harvest them fill a tub with distilled water and add a a couple drops of hydrogen peroxide. Than take your buds and drown them for 5 minS. Shake the bud lightly in water and u can see the dirt lift off. Remove and put a fan on them till they are not soaking wet to avoid mold. Hopefully this helps. Good luck bruH.

Thanks again to everyone for all of your wisdom and advice -- I will try some of the bud recovery methods when harvest time comes. The rest, I may make hash with. All part of the learning process.

Humanrob said:

Yeah, I fucked up. Perfect storm of mishaps and misjudgments, and one of my closets got so out of hand with gnats that now about half the buds look like fly paper in a shit storm. It's 4 weeks into flower at the moment.

How did it get so out of hand? A few main factors: First grow. I read that gnats aren't really a problem because they don't harm the plants, so I waited too long to act. I got gnat infested soil. I used a bad mix (rookie mistake) and one of my soil components had water retention properties, which promoted fungus, which fed the gnats larva/nymphs(?).

So, some questions.... How bad is it to smoke gnats? Would making tincture in 151 Rum be an OK use of the buds? Should I just pull the plants, scrap the grow, and chalk it up to an expensive lesson learned?

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Humanrob said:

Yeah... kind of biblical in a plague-like way.

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That's really gross. u should have let the soil dry out and used beneficial nematodes.

Holy fucking fuck.

patrickkawi37 said:

Holy fucking fuck.

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That about says it all.

Humanrob said:

Yeah... kind of biblical in a plague-like way.

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Don't trash the crop, it is totally salvageable.
That happened to me (albeit to a much smaller degree, on the branches closest to the soil) with some of my outdoor crop last year, along with a bit of mold. If you don't want to smoke the gnats (and who would?) you can actually wash your bud before you hang it up to dry. I used four 5 gallon buckets, the first with a roughly 1:3 hydrogen peroxide and water mix, second with warm water + 1 cup baking soda + 1 cup lemon juice, third with hot water, fourth with cold water. Vigorously shook and repeatedly dunked and gently squeezed buds underwater for 30 seconds each bucket, swung them to remove excess moisture, hung briefly in the sun, then moved indoors to circulating air hang dry area. Not only did it remove all the debris, gnat carcasses included, but it didn't damage the trichomes at all. Here are magnified pictures of the buds AFTER being washed so you can see the complete lack of trichome damage. Buds dried perfectly as well, even possibly a bit more evenly than the unwashed buds.

Ace Yonder said:

...the complete lack of trichome damage...

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Nice!

thanks for the good info and pics.

Wow i never seen anything like that man

Ive tried diatomaceous earth and it didnt work. Never tried sand but theres a product called mosquito bits or crumbles and it looks like bacon bits in a shaker. It works great, just sprinkle a heaping tablespoon around the top of the soil and a week or so later no more gnats. Its cheap too and on amazon.
Another thing is making sure theres no standing water anywhere either, table corners and drains and such are breeding grounds for them. Spray with bleach water to kill em in all equipment.

@Humanrob thank you!! you have just made me feel so much better about the gnats i've been battling. nematodes applied tonight after seeing them for a few months. top-dressing of sand didn't work, drying out the pots didn't work, yellow stickies didn't work, DE didn't work, mosquito bits didn't work...

good luck on salvaging your grow. let us know how you do with your final product. @Ace Yonder's suggestion is awesome and sounds like it will save your grow. i'll report back on the nematodes.

undercovergrow said:

@Humanrob thank you!! you have just made me feel so much better about the gnats i've been battling. nematodes applied tonight after seeing them for a few months. top-dressing of sand didn't work, drying out the pots didn't work, yellow stickies didn't work, DE didn't work, mosquito bits didn't work...

good luck on salvaging your grow. let us know how you do with your final product. @Ace Yonder's suggestion is awesome and sounds like it will save your grow. i'll report back on the nematodes.

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You are very welcome. I look forward to hearing how the nematodes work. I thought I had them gone but some are still lingering in my grow.

Yodaweed said:

Get some mosquito dunks and crush them up in your soil before you plant in it. Gnat problem solved.

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I agree with the mosquito dunks. Since ur almost done do it on ur next grow and it will prevent getting any. Also the yellow sticky fly traps work great. Also don't worry about the ones on the buds. Just trim as you harvest and you will cut most of them off.

I had the same issue my last grow so don't worry about it. Main way to avoid them is to not overwater. You only want to water every 3-4 days.

probably not even gnats.

TWS said:

probably not even gnats.

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OK... what do you think they are? I'm new to this.

They might be root aphids.

Humanrob said:

Thanks everyone for your help.

I've pretty much got it under control -- applied both SNS203 and Diatomaceous Earth about a week ago. The problem is that the "damage" has already been done, in terms of the sticky buds acting like fly paper and being covered with dead gnats that are stuck to them (not all of the buds, but about half of them...).

So now that they are there, I'm trying to decide what can be done with those buds.

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I wouldn't smoke buds covered in dead bugs, myself.

Fungus gnats are rather easy to kill. They are hard to rid of completely because of the larva and such keeps popping out new generations. But if your having issues killing them with mosquito dunks and like an sns203 drench.. I would look at the bugs under a microscope because like mentioned above it could be root aphids. I had a battle with these recently and they are bastards

here's the organic way for both pest and many more,

http://bioworksinc.com/products/mycotrol-o.php

patrickkawi37 said:

Fungus gnats are rather easy to kill. They are hard to rid of completely because of the larva and such keeps popping out new generations. But if your having issues killing them with mosquito dunks and like an sns203 drench.. I would look at the bugs under a microscope because like mentioned above it could be root aphids. I had a battle with these recently and they are bastards

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Since my other room is getting closer to being finished, I picked up an inexpensive 30x magnifier just the other day, so I'll take a look -- I've read about the "twin tail pipes". When they first got bad I went to a local hydro store to get something to kill them with, and I stuck a bunch to a piece of tape and brought it with me so that they could ID it. The main guy said gnats, so that's what I went with, but he could be wrong, he never looked at it under a scope.