Hey Fert... Spinosad works on Russets... the challenge with them is when the female goes dormant. She makes a home inside the plant tissue and waits for conditions to be good again and she pops out and starts laying eggs again. With mites a 2 prong attack is best. Spinosad you can use every 3 days for the whole grow, it shouldn't affect the health of the plant. I've never seen any negative effect using it and I use it enough...
I use 2 tbs of Monterrey garden spray (spinosad) to a 1/2 gal of water with an active infestation. I think the label reads 4 tbs/gal... every 2-3 days, for Russets thats for at least a month.
Try adding in some Pro-tekt and some Ful-Power... I also add in pure coconut water no preservatives and no sugar added.... and some Kelp tea and some Horsetail Fern Tea. I have teas in my fridge waiting .... Horsetail Fern Tea, Kelp meal tea and neem cake tea. For the teas I just pour in about 1/4 cup of each.
Yea today.. and I'm a few days away from harvest, I just found a mite outbreak. The Borg are back.. on 1 plant that I didn't have a fan pointed at and bam right at the wrong time. I've got a jungle and cant get in there to hit all the leaves etc. I'll be spraying daily until chop time. Not all the ladies are coming down. I waited too long to harvest - got greedy... happens every time. I should know better.
When you have an infestation and you go into the room and interact with your plants, remember those eggs can get on you ... and why I do very little if any interactions with my plants. You cart a few eggs away... they fall on the floor somewhere in your house... they find their way back into the garden.
Mites suck.. I always get them, its just a matter of time. Getting them this time of year and again in the late spring. I stopped IPM cause I have a room full of flowers and I don't really like to spray flowers if I don't absolutely have to. The risk is an infestation startup .. right before harvest of maybe 1/2 my room.
Also any plant material you have after harvest - needs to go in the garbage or in an HOT compost pile.
A lot of people think they can rid themselves of mites. It's probably not possible. You are managing them with an IPM (integrated pest management) not eradicating them. Eradication calls for a lot stronger chemicals. That is a WAY last resort for me.
Spinosad works on Russets... trust me... I've done a lot of research. Spray the room and the plants and the soil and the containers. Everything... even the floor outside the grow room ... it wont hurt. It's not harmful to humans and is completely Organic.
What our goal is - its to make the environment too hostile and the pests will (hopefully) move on to greener pastures.
Also do NOT keep unhealthy plants ... cull and move on. Pests attack the weakest link. Healthy strong plants are the best defense and why I give my plants lots of silica. That helps with pests and disease. Healthy plants can ward off pests - they have an immune system and can make themselves taste bad and they also can communicate to other plants close by that they are being eaten ... warning the neighbors that unwanted guests are hanging around. It's no BS.. All out war.
All we do is help a little bit.
You need to stick with the Spinosad, get in a routine and just do it.. I usually do my IPM the same time soon before lights out so the liquid stays on the leaves longer as light breaks down Spinosad pretty quickly, talking minutes, and don't skip days .. you can spray every 3 days .. I do every 2 days when there's active infestation. I will spray again tomorrow cause I know I didn't get all the plants ... I'll have to harvest a few just to get to them all.
Mites like warm DRY conditions... winter time indoors, humidity drops ... bam mites show up.
G/L hit me back with any questions. I'm heading over to your journal to check it out.
Do you know if it's safe around pets? I have the whole room quarantined right now anyway though because I bought some of those NoPest Strips to use and they say not to use in any living space. So I'm sleeping on the couch lol
I'm actually not solidly convinced the spinosad is what did the plant damage, just worried about how gentle it is beacuse of all the damage the mites and I have done. I'll do a brief run-through of what happened... I discovered the mites around Christmas, read up on them a little bit, and decided to drop my temperatures down really low by taking my heater out of the room. They plummeted down to 50 F. I ordered the spinosad and sprayed every 2-3 days, but I can't really tell you when I started that, I'm not sure when it arrived in the mail. But I noticed the plants getting much more unhealthy, and concluded from my experience it was from the fact they were in half full 1 gallon pots and all root-bound. So I transplanted them, my flowering tent plants went into 5 gallon buckets, the veg tent girls went into 3s. Since then I stopped with the spinosad thinking it might be what was doing the damage ( and after spotting some more living mites ) and switched to neem teas. I would brew about 4 tbsp of the neem seed meal into a gallon for 48 hrs, and spray them with plain water in between. After I transplanted and got the NoPest strips, I took my exhaust out of the wall, so the heat and humidity from the light are circulating and keeping it more like 77-79 F and about 40% humidity, but it's hard to get the RH much higher. I was really just unsure of the neem tea, wondering if the high nitrogen level could be causing burn, so I went and got some neem oil that I've used a lot in the past to stamp out two-spotted mites and never saw damage from--you know just trying to troubleshoot out stuff that's "different". I've only given them one spray of that so far this morning.
Anyway, it's hard to say if any of them are really "healthy". These are from a few days ago, and I can see some health improvements; turgor pressure is back up, the stems are going from a solid deep purple back to green, there's no/little chlorosis on new growth ( though some burnt tips ). I think they're on the mend but it's hard to tell. A part of me wonders if I should not scrap this run and start some new seeds instead. I have lots of new stuff to try, but I really wanted to try to hold on to these genetics.
Here are some pics today, I haven't updated my journal real well lately, here's a new post with recent pics... (so as to not spam up your journal with my ugly plant pics)
Panama x Malawi - Probiotic & Organic Indoor Soil Grow
I feel like it's just a lot of different stress for them to deal with right now, but I really had the feeling leaving them in those small pots was going to kill them. They were quite root bound when I pulled them out, so I wonder if it is just the timing of all this combined. In any case, considering all that, I'm just worried about spraying with anything that's also going to stress them out and I just don't know nothing about spinosad, not real familiar with neem tea, and I'm used to neem oil (usually with soil drenches, not foliar spraying) working on everything so I'm out in the woods on this one.
Oh I do have some General Hydro AppArmor Si silica if that would be a good thing? Certainly throws the organic out the window, but I've also heard that soil microbes don't do too well with it and it's hard on roots, so I'm hesitant of using that. I'm just pretty much down to making due with what I have since I can't buy any more stuff for a while. But I have neem seed meal, neem oil, spinosad, and this silica supplement, so it seems like I've got a good toolset. Not to mention the NoPest strip, which I'm probably only going to leave hanging for a week, I just want that "knock down" punch. I use to use the silica and neem oil regularly and hadn't had a problem with two-spotted mites since I first started using them, but I don't know how effective it is on russets--I kind of stopped using it to try to be more organic/probiotic, plus thinking the neem meal in the soil would substitute for the neem oil drenches.
I'm kind of in between a rock and a hard place on the environmental conditions too because these plants do not like cold temperatures any more than the mites do. The breeder recommends they stay at least at 75 and I saw them get pretty unhappy in just the low 60s on my last cycle with them, so I do think the 50 F temperatures played a part in all this. I can't lower the temperature any more than they are without putting the exhaust back into the wall, but I don't want to do that with the NoPest strips still up because that vents right into my living room.
I'm really so used to just using neem oil drenches and never seeing an issue. I understand cross contamination issues pretty well, but I'm pretty sure I got these off a friend's clones. Ugh. Friend's don't let friends take clones from other people! Not even once! Happens every freakin' time I've done it.
Anyway sorry to spam up your journal bob... Maybe I should just go back to my old IPM (the silica and neem-oil drenches) and throw in spinosad sprays too? I'm probably (hopefully) never going to use the NoPest strip again, this is just a extreme measure--like high orbit nuclear bombardment. They apparently work THAT well, but I'm not wiling to leave them up for more than a week. I'm optimistic the neem oil drenches will work, because I kept them at bay most of the last cycle with it, I just ran out of the neem oil. *crosses fingers*
That was really bothering me... hopefully gone now. 
