MarijuanaGrowGuide - Growing Marijuana Guide - Pests

Dealing With Pests In an Indoor Marijuana Grow

Pests or bugs can be devastating to your indoor marijuana crop. Many of these bugs are hard to detect before they have a stranglehold on your entire marijuana crop. Many times new growers will mistake the signs of pests infestations as poor growing techniques. This leads to letting the pests run unchecked and eventually to the destruction of your cannabis crop and wasting your time and money.

The best offense to keeping them from destroying your plants is to not let them inside your grow room from the beginning. A good cleaning and sterilization of your marijuana grow room prior to planting a new crop is critical. Then the marijuana grower will need to keep on top of any pests that get in to the grow room as not to let them destroy their crop. However even with a good sterile cannabis grow room, you can still get an infestation. You must stay vigilant in you pest control all the way through your marijuana grow. The best way to control these pests is usually a natural solution since most insecticides will harm the quality of your marijuana.

Spider Mites

By far the public enemy number one to your marijuana crop is the dreaded spider mite. Spider mites are an arachnid with eight legs and reproduce at an extremely fast rate. A single spider mite can lay 20 eggs a day. Within a months time one spider mite can turn into a million or more. Spider mites usually live on the underside of leaves and are small enough you will need a magnifying glass to even see one. These pests will quite literally suck the life out of your marijuana plants. They have mouths that bite a single plant cell and suck the enzymes from it. Leaves will soon have many small yellow spots and eventually turn brown, die and fall off. This can be mistook for poor conditions and the spider mites will continue to flourish.

The signs of spider mite damage on a marijuana leaf sometimes confused with improper conditions.

Spider mites infestation can sometimes be diagnosed by seeing a collection of fine white silk clusters on the undersides of the marijuana leaf. Sometimes this can be mistaken for a fungus or mold. By the time the grower can detect these "webs" it is in the critical stages and proper control needs to be implemented immediately.

The white spider mite silk on the underside of a leaf. Sometimes can be confused with mold or fungus.

There are two natural ways to control and/or eradicate the spider mite pests from your marijuana crop. The first is to introduce ladybugs to your cannabis grow room. Ladybugs will happily eat spider mites and ignore your marijuana plants. Using ladybugs is completely natural way to kill the spider mite pests, however this method has some serious drawbacks. The first is that if you do not have spider mites when you introduce ladybugs to your grow room, then the ladybugs will go somewhere else to feed. The second is that once an infestation is discovered, the amount of spider mites present far exceeds the appetite of even a small army of ladybugs. They can control the infestation, but the harm to your marijuana plants will continue resulting in a smaller yield and lower quality crop of cannabis.

The second method is a natural, non-toxic topical spray. I have seen many recipes for homemade spider mite solutions, but have never seen any real substantial results with any of them. A possible good solution is to use a homemade topical spray alongside ladybugs to eradicate the pests. For an immediate solution I would suggest having some No Spider Mite on hand. No Spider Mite is an organic, non-toxic commercial product that will instantly kill all stages of spider mite development from eggs to adults. It works by suffocating the pests by clogging their breathing holes of adults, all larvae stages and eggs. It is in no way toxic or harmful to your marijuana plant. There are other very similar products on the market, but I like No Spider Mite because is the most concentrated on the market which means less spraying on your marijuana crop.

Spider mites are by far the most damaging and common potential pest to your marijuana grow. They, however, are not the only pest you might need to eradicate. Some others include:

After you are done preparing for any pest infestation that could arise, it is time to get started germinating some marijuana seeds.