SO.....
Bud worms fist fucked me good. I haven't been in the mood to post progress because the last 3-4 weeks have been very discouraging, but last night was awesome and we're back on track, so I'll give a little update and then add some pics later on today.
The first signs of the catepillars/bud worm we a stiffI kick to the nuts. I had 6 White Widow PLants and 5 Casey Jones. 3 of the 5 Casey Jones colas were destroyed out of nowhere. I immediately hopped on RIU and to read up and bought the BT bacteria after taking out as many of those fuckers as I could with tweezers (what I thought was all of them.) A few days later several of the top branches were ravaged through with those worms and that's when we started to get really worried. At that point we had found traces of the worms in some of the WW plants and were worried that we may everything very affected. The trichs were so clear that pulling them wasn't a desirable option.
We had no choice on the infested branches and we did cut a lot of the top branches on that were damaged. About 4-5 oz's worth. After drying and curing, the jars still smell like cut lawn. The herb is really stoney, but it smells like garbage. I'm hoping that smell will go away after a few more weeks of curing. Does anyone know if that'll work? Yes, I've been flushing for 10 days.
So after that pretty much every other night we would spray all the plants with BT and look through every thing in the evening and were basically at a race against time. I didn't want to pull until we at least at some milk in the trichs, but the worms were invincible and we were risking losing everything. So last night, after some advice from my Arcata friends, I took down about 2lbs just to hedge my bets a little bit. It was surprisingly very little of the total yield, which i'm expecting to be between 14-18oz a plant. Well, even though the thrichs were clear, this herb is lethal. I was hugely stoked. Obviously I'm going to give the other plants as much time as possible, but as of right now I've got two p's of the best smelling grass hanging, preparing to be very loved.
I'm hoping by next weekend thet trichs on the plants will milk in and I can pull the rest of it. The pics attached are just a few I snapped yesterday, but when we take the whole crop, I'll take some good photos of everythign and lay them out here. Disclaimer: since this is my first time trimming, these buds don't look great and that dude with bud mustache was a friend of ours helping trim - he was also not very good.
For accomplishing what we did as a first timer, I'm still fairly satisfied of where we were able take it. Next time I will probably plant more and be more dilligent about insect prevention, though i'm not really sure what we can do to prevent those worms. They come from moths who aren't really deterred from neem oil, and once you get them, getting rid of them is a borderline impossibility.
Thanks again to RIU for all the help to get this far and I look forward to hopefully posting some fully matured, amber triched, white widow from a successful rookie grow that had a few speed bumps.
peace, D