Root Aphids

bshdctr said:

Actually my plan is to finish this harvest, kill everything, not have any plants for several weeks, clean the crazy hell out of everything,
and START AGAIN FROM SEED.......in soil.

I've been a soil grower for over a decade and rarely have to battle bugs. I like my meds grown in soil and if done correctly maybe once every few years I have to deal with bug problems. Small price to pay for pot that I love to smoke (soil grown..)

Click to expand...

hate to be a buzzkill, but that thread I linked earlier is filled with stories of growers who did this thinking it would be the ultimate solution. If it works for you, you will be the first success story that I have seen.

Everything can be beat in veg except russet mites. If you have russet mites, burn your house to the ground, it's over.

The last two posts are kinda funny for me. Here's why:
1st, I disagree clobbersaurus. I feel that if you kill everything and go on a cleaning frenzy for several weeks, you will be able to start again bug-free.
2nd, my reasoning for the above is this is what I did to get rid of RUSSET MITES last year! I lost two very special Vortex cuts but I was able to get rid of the mites by killing everything, and going on a cleaning freak out. I mean seriously OCD crazy balls to the wall cleaning with several products both insecticides and cleaning products such as hospital grade lysol. I go APESHIT cleaning.

Oh jesus, you had to fight those fuckers too? They SUCK! After beating fungus gnats, spider mites, and root aphids, I thought I could beat anything. Especially since everyone said root aphids were unkillable and I beat them. Well... I was WRONG! The russets survived rosemary oil, cinnamon oil, peppermint oil, neem oil, 71% rubbing alcohol, gassing with CO2 (put the plants in buckets, burned alcohol in them so there was no oxygen, left them overnight in the dark like that), etc. I almost killed the plants with the alcohol and still, the russet mites came back. They make spider mites look like a complete joke. I had to kill everything (Blueberry, Jack Herer, Purple People Eater, Chocolope, GX, and Sour Diesel - OUCH!), I'm just getting started again after leaving my room empty for the last 4 months to give any lingering eggs time to hatch and die. I kept the room nice and toasty for the first month with a humidifer going full blast, hoping that would encourage them to hatch. I'm about to scrub everything down a second time and have a go at it... got some cuts of Pre-98 Bubba Kush so I'm real excited to be back in the game. Prayin' there's no zerg waiting to hatch and fuck everything up, again...

For those who haven't had them, I got the russets from a clone... buyer beware, that's where everyone gets them... most vendors won't tell you about things like this, so you should know and TRUST your clone source. Some think they had it beat - russets can go a month or two without showing signs if the room is cool, but trust me... they always come back. Ugh.

Things to look for on clones for those in the audience... little orange specks on the leaves, they're little lines, very tiny, smaller than spider mites, they don't appear to move... when you look at them with a microscope they look like little maggots, sooner or later they crawl around... before the damage becomes really obvious like in the photos below, the growth nodes put on a spurt of really, really fast growth...

In the first photo you can see what I mean, they look like little orange specks, you can see them all over the stem and the leaf... they attack the freshest most supple growth first, and tend to hang out on the tops of the leaves, all unlike spider mites. It almost looks like the leaves are rusting... in fact at first I thought it was a fungal attack.

Once you find them on one plant, you can be sure they've made it to the rest of your garden... it can be weeks or months before they show themselves... namely, if you keep on truckin' you'll find them in flower... DISASTER... I was lucky they showed themselves in veg so I never saw them on a flowering plant.

Oh man, just seeing those pics make me cringe!
When I first saw them on my Vortex plants last year I didn't even think they were bugs, I thought it was just a build up of dust or something....because they were so small. Just like you said above they act nothing like spider mites and took my plants down fast! Scary to think about.

purklize said:

Stop everything you guys are doing... it's all hopeless. I don't even have to read the thread to say that... I tried everything, spent weeks researching this stuff and literally everything failed.

Ultimately I had to come up with my own solution.

You need to switch to growing hydro. DWC, to be specific. You cannot have ANYTHING in soil anymore.

Click to expand...

With all due respect, these have been fought very successfully by many growers, who still grow in soil.
I am quite happy in soil and in fact first got these bugs when in hydro. But you would have known that if you would have read the thread.......
I will defeat these, i will continue to grow in soil or any other way i chose. I have just started the war with these, and i am not afraid to take extreme measures to get rid of them entirely.
You even state in a later post that anything can be beat in veg, and i feel that is spot on. I may have to limit my attacks in flower, but in veg i can attack away, until i am ultimately successful.

Have fun with that, it took me months of dunking plants every week in soil to get the populations down 99%... never 100%, they always came back after a few weeks. With hydro, one dunk and it's done (the water HAS to be SOAPY or it doesn't work). It's the air pockets in the soil that allow that 1% to survive every time you dunk, those aren't present in hydroton. Please do link me to the success stories fighting root aphids in soil, I searched for a long time and never found a single one that didn't involve toxic chemical pesticides that linger in the plant for years.

Agreed, and may I add that when I'm battling them I use H2o2 at maximum levels to inhibit their fungi and bacteria they bring. Yes it wipes out all the bennies, but going back to the tea method is okay when you are certain they are wiped out.

purklize said:

Have fun with that, it took me months of dunking plants every week in soil to get the populations down 99%... never 100%, they always came back after a few weeks. With hydro, one dunk and it's done (the water HAS to be SOAPY or it doesn't work). It's the air pockets in the soil that allow that 1% to survive every time you dunk, those aren't present in hydroton. Please do link me to the success stories fighting root aphids in soil, I searched for a long time and never found a single one that didn't involve toxic chemical pesticides that linger in the plant for years.

Click to expand...

Did a pretty good job of ruining my night with this, i believe i have some shot of being able to save things.
Why can't you go back to soil since you have successfully killed them all? If you didn't leave any then you shouldn't have to worry about it right?
There are a lot of ways to fight these things, i highly doubt that you tried them all, so i believe that i can take out the 1% that lives with predatory nematodes, and if i can't then i will make a new plan of action.

Shit, I'm sorry, did you mean you're going to kill everything and put clones in a sealed chamber for the 2 weeks it takes to root? If you do that you should be okay... I'd try to leave them in the chamber as long as possible to make sure there's no flyers around still. I just prefer to recommend switching to DWC because if they do get infested again somehow you have an easy way to get rid of them.

I thought you meant you were going to try to exterminate them from an already infested plant, that's almost impossible in soil. Sorry to rain on your parade man, I feel bad. I know how it feels to be told your grow is fucked cause of pests and it fucking sucks. If it's any comfort, using consistent drenches with 1/4tsp rosemary oil and one squirt of soap in a gallon of water at least once a week kept their population in check... try to use peppermint oil occasionally so they don't get resistance to rosemary... this allowed me to finish the plants I had flowering in soil and get a nice crop, I'm sure I lost yield but the quality was still good, I got almost 0.5g/w regardless... it's just such a pain having to drench or dunk every single plant every week for months because if you stop they will always come back.

The only pest that means your grow is so utterly fucked that you should trash everything on the spot is the russet mite. It was horrible losing all the genetics I had but I am very glad I did it. They CANNOT be beaten, even the scientific literature says the populations can only be controlled, not eradicated. You have to shut everything down for a while and scrub everything down, toss anything that might have been contaminated with eggs, seeds from infested plants are no good either as russets lay eggs on them which can survive winter...

Should i put the soap and essential oil into the nutrient solution?
If i could get a .5 a watt i wouldn't be devastated, i am afraid i am going to get far far less than that, and i have made a commitment to someone who needs this as much as i do. So if i can't produce i feel i am going to have to buy it for him out of my pocket, and i can't afford that.

You did not answer my question however, do you feel that you could return to soil now that you have eradicated them? If i was to finish off what i have and start a new with hydro, following your directions could i eventually return to my beloved soil? Just want to get options. But i am hoping for nematode success.

Yeah you could definitely return to soil, but you might want to, lol - DWC is so much more pleasant to work with than soil and gives much better results. As soon as there's no flyers (adult winged root aphids) buzzing around the room, you can go back to soil. All it takes is one adult root aphid to infest a plant as they can reproduce asexually.

You should be able to get close to 0.5g/w if you have a good light and have otherwise treated the plants well...

For DWC, I would not put the soap in the nutrient solution, it foams like crazy with the air stone in it. Also, the point of this is to suffocate the root aphids, so there's no real reason to use the nute solution to try to exterminate, cause it's going to get aerated anyway... hence the root aphids being able to breathe. They barely need anything, just the tiniest pockets and they survive, hence the problems killing them in soil. Every time I dunked in soil, I would look at it an hour later, and see those fucks crawling around again... lots of survivors. The first time I dunked in DWC... the hydroton was floating and I saw one single root aphid swim to the surface, try to crawl on the pellet, then it rolled over and drowned... when I lifted up the bucket 30 minutes later dead root aphids just poured out, hundreds of them... and that was it. They were gone.

So yeah... just follow the procedure I gave earlier. Take cuttings, root them in rockwool in a yogurt container that's placed inside a sealed gallon ziplock (so they can't get infested) (I soak the cubes in RO water with Botanicare 1-5-4 added until the pH is 5.8 or the ppm is 200, both give the same pH). Then start growing them in the buckets, once they've rooted, which should be about 2 weeks. At that point you'll probably not have any flyers left, so long as you weren't hanging onto any soil plants (do NOT keep growing soil while switching to hydro, it just means you have to dunk over and over and it's horrible, cause they spread from the soil plant back to the hydro, it's important each of these steps is simultaneous for all plants so that doesn't happen). But if you see signs of the root aphids again, just cover them with plastic so the plant pokes out through a little slit or hole, this helps keep them out... and then dunk everything on the same day, 30 minutes in soapy water with 1/4tsp rosemary oil added per gallon of water... then rinse off the roots and plop them in fresh nutes. So long as you don't have flyers to reinfest your plants you'll get a 100% kill rate.

I wouldn't bother with the nematodes, biological controls only work to control populations, not eradicate them... I've never heard of them eliminating an infestation outright. You'll be better off religiously dunking/drenching your soil plants in 1/4tsp rosemary oil per gallon water with a squirt of dish soap... do it once a week until your plants are all finished up. It will keep the population low enough that they can grow relatively unimpeded, but if you stop they'll come back. Switch up to peppermint oil sometimes so they don't get resistance.

I tried everything except the nematodes and toxic chemical pesticides. I heard from enough people that nematodes don't eradicate them that I didn't bother, and around the time I would've tried them I thought of the DWC dunking idea. So I tried rosemary oil, peppermint oil, cinnamon oil, neem oil (they loved this, the population exploded after that LOL), tobacco tea (didn't even flinch), diatomaceous earth, dunking, drenching, covering the stems and the sides of the pots with tanglefoot to trap ones that crawled out during the drench which killed thousands, it was disgusting dead bugs on top of dead bugs in that horrible goo of doom... it was the tanglefoot/trapping them in the goo idea that led me to the DWC one... basically I realized the problem wasn't that we didn't have ways of killing them, but that they could escape the killing agent (breathing air bubbles or crawling out), the DWC dunk makes all that impossible, no air pockets to be found there and no way to crawl onto a hydroton pellet, it just rolls over when they climb on it and dumps htem back underwater. The ones with wings would fly out of the soil and get into the foliage, waiting for the soil to dry enough for them to return, so that's why the tanglefoot idea ultimately failed... that's why I covered the plants in hydroton with plastic around the stem, so those guys would be SOL.

T - just know that we have your back on replacements as you need bro. i've got a few saved over here i can kick down whenever and i'm about to take some more clones. would hate to lose some of the strains you have (esp the ChemCindy), but do what you gotta do and let me know how I can help.

Thanks for the help EC, as always.
I will update with my plans, i really don't think i can kill of all of veg as you suggested, i have to keep production up through this whole process, i can not afford to buy as much as the 2 of us go through, so i have to find a way to make things work for a bit to build a bit of a stash to get through the down time.
I do intend to disconnect the veg and flower rooms from being a single environment, not looking forward to how much work this is going to be, but it should help with controlling heat a bit also.
Updates to come, but at this point the fliers have become an issue, i intend to bomb and mallot drench the veg room and try to kill off as much as i can, then pitch everyone into flower. My have to sacrifice the Pre-98 bubba, but i am going to try to save her as she should yield well at her size.

Just do what I suggested and you'll be fine, you'll get good yields of great stuff, I promise. Try dropping your plants into plastic grocery bags, and tie them closed around the base of the plant... it'll keep the flyers from coming out and getting stuck on the buds.

keep at it man you can beat them in soil people have definitely done it.

Do you have a link to any success stories? I searched long and hard while fighting them and couldn't find a single one. They always came back after a month or two (with soil).

its going to take me a few but yeah i'll try and find them. it involved tossing all plants, acquiring new cuttings and rooting them at a separate location, and as far as preventing it from coming back i believe they used met-52 applied to soil a couple of weeks prior to using the soil. but let me see if i can find it my instructions may not be exact.

http://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=159960&page=111 read post by eclipse 420
http://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=159960&page=113 read post by puff adder
and i've only been reading for like 5 minutes

My guess is some people THINK they are cleaning their grow rooms enough to eradicate them, but don't actually sterilize their grow rooms, houses, laundry, and they bring them back in without knowing it. I brought mine back in on a heater once I believe.