can someone please tell me what bugs these are?

[billhicks]

my plants are 10 weeks old and 6 weeks into flower, growing in per/ver mix, hand watered under a 400 watt son t. about 2 weeks ago i noticed some very small black bugs, less than 0.5mm, crawling around in my medium, they are all black, with what looks like a pair of little horns or feelers on the front, ive been told they are fungus nats and they wont harm my plant....Is this right..? my plants are all healthy and have no sign of trouble..Its just that theres quite a few now and I would like to make sure they wont kill my babies... There are no bugs on the plant, just in the medium...and they dont fly around....

 

Cheers for da help....

[skankmaster]

Hey Billhicks, can you get a pic of the critters? As far as i iknow fungusgnats have wings and buzz around the plant. If they are fungusgnats they can harm your plant, but being so far into flower you should be ok if you have not noticed any problems. Someone(i thing it was Mr Skywalker) posted a thread a while back saying that if you leave the soil to dry out fully between waterings, the larvae will not survive. It is the larvae you have to worry about as they eat your root system.

There are drenches that you can use but they are pretty toxic and i wouldn't recommend using them at this stage(well i wouldn't recommend them at all actually, but depending on how you grow they are available).

Hope this helps, see if ya can get a pic.

[Buddy]

Its pretty hard to tell without a pic but I would try spraying them with Pyrethrum and see if that gets rid of them,its made from natural ingredients and wont harm your plant.

You can buy it from any garden supply shop or nursery.....it wouldnt hurt to take a couple with you in a jar and see if a nursery person can identify them.

[Guest Wilderbud]

Let your medium dry out. If its fungus gnats then they should go away if you let the medium dry out daily supposedly - Ive been having problems with them lately heh.

[skankmaster]

Yeah i think its the season for the critters as i have em too.

[Tom]

and 6 weeks into flower

Your plants are probably a bit too close to harvest for using directly applied chemical insecticides, check out the prevention link in my signature.

[skankmaster]

I would be very careful using Pyrethrum at this stage also mate. I used Pyrethrum once a few weeks before harvest(to get rid of mites) and it fucked the plant over big time. If your plants look happy, get a pack of the sticky fly paper rolls and put them around the plant/s to catch any flying/moving buggers. Also let the medium dry out betwen waterings as Wilderbud said.

[Luke Skywalker]

skankmaster Posted on Nov 12 2003, 11:07 AM

  I would be very careful using Pyrethrum at this stage also mate. I used Pyrethrum once a few weeks before harvest(to get rid of mites) and it fucked the plant over big time.

 

Ouch... that must have been a nasty experience... Can I ask what kind of pyrethrum you used, and how you applied it? Conditions etc... just looking to see if we can pin down what not to do with certain pesticides, every piece of information helps another grower, eh?

[skankmaster]

No probs Luke, i used the Pyrethrum in the white "sharp shooter" bottle available at all hardware/gardening stores big-w, k-mart, mitre 10, bunnings etc. I am not sure of the brand but i will check and let you know. I sprayed the plant once just before lights out(after finding mites) and noticed a few days later that the plant was not so happy(leaves a little "droopy") with some leaves yellowing and dying. So i flushed the medium with fresh water and sprayed the leaves with fresh ph adjusted rain water(before lights out). The leaves "perked" up but were still yellowing. A few days later the mites were back in full force so i sprayed again. A day or two later more leaves were yellowing and some of the leaves were dying from the edges and working in towards the veins. I flushed again but she was not looking too happy at all. I had probably two and a half weeks to go before harvest and was hoping the second spray would kill all the mites- no such luck as a few days later there were heaps of the bastards about the plant. I reluctantly sprayed once more and i think that was the last straw. All the fan leaves yellowed and dried up as well as some of the small leaves that stick out of the buds, you could see the plant was very unhappy and even more unhealthy. The poor plant looked like a fruit tree that had lost all of its leaves for winter. The buds stopped growing and i got out 5 ounces of really shitty tasting bud that i couldn't get stoned on, wheras i should've got HEAPS more than that(it was a pretty big Skunk plant). 5 ounces and a $600 power bill, i was pissed, and surprised too..

I know for sure it was the Pyrethrum as it couldn't have been anything else, there were no other bugs or reason why the plant did what it did, especially after it had been SO healthy before the spraying. I now grow Garlic with my plants(after reading about it here) and have not had any mites in my last two grows and if some do eventually appear i will be using homemade garlic/chilli sprays for sure...

Hope this helps.

ps: you know what i mean by the leaves being droopy/perky?

[Luke Skywalker]

Sounds like you leached the plants leaves of nutes each time you flushed and sprayed em... they may have recovered had you not sprayed after the initial one.... Still, I have heard a few growers complain about that brand. Sometimes it's strain dependent too, so I usually do a small spot test of anything I'm using.

 

Also, temps could have been an issue, any sprays of that nature used in 30 plus degrees can be extrememly damaging, as they coat the stomata... Not to mention the sucking out of nutrients from the leaf through osmosis... Good call on the flush and spray with ph adjusted water initially, but that should have probably been it really. Any subsequent sprays on the plant would have leached em, which is why the leaves turned yellow, then brown... They were starving...

 

That's just a tentative diagnosis tho, I don't use pyrethrum on my plants much, only for some of the lesser bugs like aphids, mites are just too damn tough for that stuff. As you said, prevention is better than cure.

 

Sorry to hear about the plants, but we can only live and learn as we grow eh? I take it you did much better subsequently, Master Skank....