got spiders mites 1st grow and not sure what to do

Professor Puff.n.Tuff

Active Member
You need to bomb the room. You can get bombs from hydro stores that will work on them for about 5 bucks. Also pick up Neem Oil, I use Rose Defense.

Set the bomb off, and spray them with the neem oil everyday to every other day, make sure to get the under side of the leaves as this is were the eggs are. I would set off another bomb about a week after the first and keep spraying for a couple weeks. I mix the neem oil with my folair spray as a offensive approach if I dont have them, it keeps the leaves shiny and healthy looking too.

The bomb will kill adults and the spray will kill the eggs. This is why you have to continue and repeat the steps for a long time, it ensures you have treated the plants longer than the life span of the mites.

If you are flowering you can not spray, imo. You are stuck at the mercy of the bombs at this point.

I had them on one plant also. At first site I yanked it and threw it away. I kept the others and used the neem oil until flower and had no more signs of them. You may want to consider tossing the one that is affected. This will increase the likeliness of you being able to kill and control them.
 

YGrow

Active Member
I got mites a while ago from a clone that a friend gave me. For a while, I just fought them with stuff like Doctor Doom Spider Mite Knockout, but they would always come back.

A very experienced grower that I know got involved and his first suggestion was to wash my plants, every other day, with plain water. I would take my plants from veg, into my kitchen where I would wash them thoroughly with the sink sprayer. This worked really well for curbing their numbers, but never really completely got rid of them.

The final solution was a combination of bombing and starting over. I took cuttings of each strain and trashed all of my plants, making sure to get the trash out of my house immediately. Mites can tell when a plant has been cut down and will try to get back into the grow and onto your plants. I sent the clones to a friend's house who checked them two or three times a day, for two weeks, for any sign of mites. Once everything was out of my house, I set off a pyrethrum bomb in the room where I grow and let it sit closed up for 12 hours. After another 12 hours of airing out the room, I went in and did a thorough cleaning of all surfaces, especially the carpet. Once all of this was done and my friend assured me that the clones were completely mite-free, I had him bring the clones back and I started growing again.

I really hated doing this, as it set me way back on the amount I could grow this year, but now it is paying dividends. My grow is completely mite-free for the first time in a couple of years and the ladies are loving it. You'll never get truly great results until you remove all the things that can stress your plants. The biggest stressors of all are pests.

Don't screw around and be lazy like I was. Set up a quarantine area, take some cuttings and put them there, get rid of your infested plants and bomb the hell out of your grow room. Anything less is just putting a bandaid on a gaping head wound.
 
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