lol.
To my eye, it looks like a Thrips damage pattern, but did you say uou saw mites> Or a bug?. Is there any shininess or 'wet look' to some/many affected leaves?
you can make a cheap lactic acid spray with milk or a slightly more expensive citric acid spray to combat pm.
literally just milk or concentrated lemon juice with water.
Not for thrips obv., but for moulds/fungis y'all should make some Lactus Bacillus bacteria serum. Its the working ingredient in the milk idea. It'll take two weeks to make but, I would. Moulds only, not bugs. It's the workin element in Bokashi, an important element in Bill's recent solo cup and potting tutorial in his journal - an expensive part. Make it yourself it costs 5$ and you get a concentrate that mixes out to 60 litres when used. What he uses/purchases is bags of wheat bran that has been sprayed with the stuff and then dried. You can buy wheat bran and do that yourself too for seedling/uppotting, or just use the spray as many do. Same diff. This year I like to use the spray heavily to activate my insect frass, pro-biotic party!.
@Azimuth has a thread focusing on these Korean Natural Farming/JADAM homemade solutions that I've benefitted from tremendously this year.
I've been very impressed with the stuff and initially was quite skeptical. You can spray on pet's bed for effective control odour, works better than febreeze and, again, 5$/60litres of spray. These little gram-positive bacilli will eat the stink off of shit! No, really, that's precisely how it does it. It eats smell! Makes an excellent litterbox spray. I use to spray in my under sink garbage cupboard, and my kitchen bio-waste pail. I spray around it for smell, then I spray in it because it is an excellent compost accelerator. You have a bazillion of them in your body, likely would be the safest spray in your house and can replace a bunch of environmentally harmful, expensive sprays/products. It is a probiotic added to many foods just to sell them as such. Also If you search online for EM1 this is the major or only ingredient of that product depending on the version.
I recently had a bad exploding-jar fiasco on my heated stirrer-hot plate in the 'lab' and the mess was awful. the liquid had been chock full of sugars, other bacteria, solids... and Mr. Clean wasn't getting it done so I thought I'd try the lactose bac. and... daaaaayuuuum... I didn't even have to scrub. No joke. Burnt sugar x nasties = no problem, it just....well.... ate it. I just wiped up after the meal basically. That's when I got on the ground, prostrate before my spray bottle, and became an acolyte in the religion of the bacillus lactus.
It takes two weeks to make. The 5$ is for the gallon of milk. I actually make mine with powdered milk, the bacilli don't care. I haven't tried it on PM yet, waiting for it to show up in my veggies to test but tons of people say it works very well on mould for them. Outdoor growers are using it effectively to prevent or arrest bud rot. I will be testing extensively before applying a water-based spray on my buds everyday... don't want to cause mould!
I like the mellow dude at Bare Mtn. Farm on youtube and his chilled out video(s) instructing how to make and use. Chris Trump has excellent Utube videos focusing on Korean Natural farming/JADAM products of all kinds you can make and use in you canna 'farm'. I made an amazing calcium phosphate foliar spray/fert from eggshells (don't throw em away!) from Chris' videos that really did work on my tomato plants and I made about 100gal of powerful canna ferts for free using only weeds, dead flowers, dandelions, and other free elements lying on the ground around me, that and a few kilos of sugar. I subsequently searched out and transplanted all the core fertilizer-making plants in my front garden so that next year I wont even have to leave home to find/harvest them. Check out
@Azimuth his thread is fascinating, its in his sig.
I know most of you know everything discussed above but for anyone that comes across this who doesn't I hope it sparks some interest. There is also a KNF bug spray or two as well, but the milk-based spray is for powdered mildew and but rot. I've only started testing on moulds, but hope to have developed confidence in the usage by the time I need it. I'll be discussing in my journal.
