At this rate, my plants will be gone by harvest !!

Alright here is the deal...

My poor helpless beautiful little babies are getting eaten by buggers. I'm not sure what kind, I don't THINK it's Spidermites. But I still am not sure. There are small little chunks taken out of some of the plants. Very small chunks, some in lines, some in little circles....basically something is very slowly eating my plant when Im not watching. I've even inspected the plant and can't really find much when I inspect them so....I don't know! Keep in mind they are in a field outside though!!

So here is what I was wondering...

I saw sometime ago a "recipe" for a bug repellent made out of house-hold items that was safe to use on the plants and was said to work well. Does anyone know a recipe similar to this or know what I'm referring to? I searched and searched and can't find it!! I'm not talking about plain Ivory soap suds or a Tobacco mixture...it had multiple ingredients (around 5 maybe??) Arrgghhh...I wish I could find it!!! Thats what I get for surfing when I'm :stoned:

I had pretty good luck with a $4 bottle of bug killer that i got at wally world.. its supposedly safe to use up to the day of harvest on veggies.. im sure you will see it if you got there. I used the WHOLE BOTTLE and drenched a couple plants.. and I mean DRENCHED with the stuff.. including spraying the media very unsparingly.. DRENCHED is the word of the day! haha..

Ok so then I put fresh ph'd h20 in the res and flushed the medium for an hour to get the stuff out and mixed new nutes.. slightly lower strength for stressed plants

so far so good.. about a week with no bugs and plants are gaining life again. no pest stips work (the chemical kind) although i never had luck destroying the life cycle.. I can tell you something to do....

CLEAN EVERYTHING within like the whole room and adjacent room with lysol or something.. I had a random towl on the ground that it turns out the flying form of the bugs were living in and waiting till the poison would wear off and repopulate the plant.. every day 1000s of new critters.. fuckn terrible.. I almost threw in the towel.. I was litterally about to drag the rig out to the back porch and douse the whole setup in lighter fluid.. strike a match.. and achive the "final solution"

unless you are about to harvest or something i would hit up wally world for some veggie insect killer.. worked wonders for me.. and that was after the hydroponic store FAILED with expensive products over and over..

Not that im claiming this is the end all solution but i know what it is like to watch babies get eaten so I wanted to give you at least a good first strike tactic..

Hi.
Being that your babies are outdoor you can always expect them to take a role in the local ecosystem. You will never achieve a controlled environment in a field so dont stress it too bad.
Also, remember that anything you apply to the plant will make it to your lungs in some quantity.
Check the underside of the leaves for tiny little eggs. You dont want to invite a colony to set up camp so work on this first. These things you can eliminate with a citris based soap in many cases. With a solution of soap and water you can soak em down and let the soap dry the eggs out. This is not always 100% effective but I always prefer to start out using something mild. Why chem down your eventual smoke if you can avoid it.
Outdoors you will not achieve a pest free plant nor do you need to.
Leaf loss is natural and will not affect yield to any huge degree unless your babies are full blown being consumed on a huge scale.
Many times the natural predator of the pest will help out and solve the problem. Many times if you simply make it an unpleasant and hostile environment for the little pests they will simply move on to some other plant.
Try the soap out for a couple days . Dont apply too much or you can suffocate your babies. I would say use what you would for a sink of dishes...per plant. And after 24-36 hrs rinse it down so the leaves can breath. Repeat if needed and you should see a difference.

If you can, take a pic to help determine what it is eating them and how bad the damage is.
But, like I said, I prefer to start mild and only bring out the big guns if you cant solve it.

peace.

I appreciate that Aaron385!

The thing for me is that I have my crop growing in the great outdoors. It's seeds from the better bud I've had over the last two years that I kept. So I really don't know what I'm growing. I noticed 2 or 3 indica dominant plants and the rest are Sativa dominant it looks like! The younger 8 are about a month old and the older 3 are about 2 months old. I've got them in 5 gallon buckets, behind my barn, in my field :) No one's going to ever find them (I move them into the barn at nights in case of fly-overs, because they do them at night a lot of the times here). They get plenty of sun. They get a good amount of natural rain water. Nature takes it course except for that I sprinkle a tablespoon of epsom salts onto the soil every 2 weeks and I mist them about 3 times a week with a dilluted fertlizer sollution (Peter's Professional) that I got for the veggie stage. I have some different stuff I'm going to use for the flowering stage. I topped them after the 4th node. A few of them I experimented with "staking" the two new main shoots to allow the sun to penetrate the inside of the plant. It's making them really bushy :thumbsup: Those 3 older plants (2 sativa 1 indica) are going to be huge, no question. I only topped these, I didn't stake any of them. One of the sativas was growing so fast I topped all of it's main shoots AGAIN, after I had already topped it once before. I know it's probably not recommended but after it stopped growing for a day or two it is really making up for it and it's getting new shoots from the main shoots like crazy! It's shooting everywhere! haha... But I also think it's growing so tall because it's a male :( But I won't give up on it until I see nuts! I also find that those three older ones don't get eaten as much, if at all!! So what I am after is something to spray on the plants that keeps them off of it! I read in previous threads somewhere about "recipes" people used to spray their plants. I wish I had a better idea of what I was talking about so it would be easier to help me, but I'm sure someone has an idea what I am talking about!!

Sorry about the double post!

FunkyMonkey, what kind of soap should I use? Would soap that I use on dishes be alright?

I will try and get pictures tonight to help determine the problem!

Hey,
Yup a regular citrus based dishsaop without all kinds of perfumes and colours if possible. Health stores stock all kinds as do bulk stores.
This will take care of a bunch of pests and most eggs. What it does is forms a kind of skin around the egg and dries it out preventing it from maturing.
It also makes for an unpleasant snck for what is chomping on your babies. It wont work for every pest but Its a good clean start.
Usually 2 applications will do. But it is important to watch for wilting, a sign that your plants are suffocating from a coating on the leaves. All you need to do then is rinse it off. But, the soap should sit for 24 hrs.
There are some good insecticidal soaps you can find at garden centres that have an extra kick to take care of some hardier pests but I always have tried the plain 'ol soap first...in the soil as well since many pests egg in soil not on the leaf or main stock.
Pics will help some of the more 'pro' growers to ID what your pest is.

good luck, none of us want to see babes die.

peace.

mice

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by latewood

mice

---

Not likely if he's growing in buckets sitting on the ground.
And, mice will chomp whole leaves, starting from the outside working in not a little here and there. At least, in my experiences anyhow.
I had a mousie chomping on my babies one year inside until i just left the trimmings on the floor and they just took them instead.
Then I made stew out of the poop.
JK.:p

peace.