2020 Fall Thrips - I noticed spider mites and thrips for the first time in my garden during the fall of 2020. A trip to the hydro store sourced myself some Spinosad. Sadly, the employees said it was safe to spray on cannabis and we eventually failed multiple rounds of testing months later even with 90 days in between the final spray and harvest/submission to the lab. We also tried some remediation on the samples and still failed. Anyways, the spinosad did wonders for the thrips but failed to even phase the spider mites. I probably spend $600 on beneficial predator mites that harvest and we barely even dented the spider mite population. Harvest was disgusting and we spent weeks pulling webs off buds on some plants keeping them barely in check to get to cut date.
The following 2 harvests still had some small spider mite populations that we continued to attack with beneficial insects before finally eradicating them.
Summer 2021 - Russet Mites. Holy shit, we lost a crop to russets and really got knowledgeable about pests. Since then, I've sprayed wettable sulfer every veg and used beneficial mite blends twice per harvest and used beneficial nematodes. We'd been bug free for over a year until...
Winter 2023 (now) I've got Thrips again. I'm pretty surprised because we're fairly diligent on our IPM and nothing but a few fungal gnats seem to survive. So the damn thrips... I've sprayed Suffoil-X x3 times over the past 3 weeks, added x2 rounds of SF nematodes and added 2K Cucumeris mites with little effect.
So, now i'm switched to flower with 200 plants and there's still damn mites abounding. I've got another 150 plants from clone to veg size and really want to get this figured out.
Any advice????
Please and thank you.
