Meet Reefer.... indoor experiment

Found the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10641-014-0242-y

Really interesting stuff.

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Interesting. I often kept fish in quarantine/hospital tanks for a month at a time at gravity of 1.009-1.011, less than half the salt of seawater 1.024.

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Strange that parasites don’t like the lower salinity, but the fish doesn’t care as long as you acclimate it. My friend Greg Collinske is an occasional writer for ReefBuilders and when he worked at SeaLife Aquarium in Tempe we worked on straight buffered freshwater dips for new fish with formalin. I wonder if there isn’t something from the aquarium world that would work on spider mites in like a dip and rinse method we use to dip corals, but spray and rinse? Melafix is always a good coral dip.

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Idk about a commercial dip, but I’ve taken cuttings/clones and dipped them upside down in a hydrogen peroxide mix for a little bit, 50/50 Mix of 3% hydrogen peroxide and cold water. I’ve even let the whole cutting soak for a few mins before.
I’ve done the same solution for dipping corals to get rid of algae and infections, left them in for 8-15 mins after forgetting or during a water change.
On another note, has the use of no pest strips gone out of favor for controlling pests in the grow room? I use to leave it in the chambers at night when the fans were off, got rid of my mite problem very effectively that way.

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People seem to be using more leaf sprays with insecticide soap and neem oil. I do think people might appreciate if you start a thread to just show them what you have used and what they were effective on. I do think I will pick some up now just to put them up as a preventative.

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I think I will, I got three clones from a friend that have mites on them, a bit too tall to easily dip, so I’m going with nightly fumigating hot shots no pet strips. the peroxide spray I’ve been using seems to be keeping them at bay, but I’m not checking with a magnifier to see if it’s killing all of them or the eggs. I see lots of fizzing in some spots but, not uniformly across all leafs surface, so it’s targeting something. When I used it to dip smaller plants and cuttings, for sure anything that’s crawling around or in the webbing floats right off the surface, and the plant comes out clean, so it’s a more effective than just rinsing in water.

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I’m going to try the peroxide on my spearmint. The leaf eaters always go for my spearmint first.

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Also anything that tends to get fungal infections, I will spray them after it rains.

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Ok, so the mites don’t like the peroxide, but it doesn’t seem to be controlling them As well as I hoped. I saw new webbing this morning, maybe it’s the new ones that just hatched? I saw young ones but not the adults that I saw before.

Sorry, complete hijack of this thread lol. I’ll make my own when I get around to it.

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no worries, we are all in this to learn! I have done bud washing my last harvest with 4 buckets, first one was 1 cup peroxide in 5 gallons warm water, second bucket was 1 cup baking soda and lemon juice in 5 gallons of warm water, the other 2 were just water, last bucket being on the colder side… removed almost ALL the mites (had 2 plants really badly infested and used everything, fruit tree spray, neem oil, rubbing alcohol and water to keep them at bay during flowering which barely worked) and dirt from the buds, the taste is extremely noticeable, the buds I didn’t get around to washing make me cough when smoked… I am using a SHIT ton of lady bugs this year and so far have had better response than the sprays so far…

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In the past, like I said I use to use No Pest strips, it’s used in food storage even as it is a vapor. Just make sure to stop use 2 weeks before harvest. I found I was a bit sensitive to the fumes myself, though people use it I think their closets. I just make sure to vent out the grow room and have a carbon scrubber attached. I put it in at night when the exhaust fans were off so it could build up, using it for a week or two at a time killed all bugs, just have to wait for all the eggs to hatch. For buds that were infested at harvest, I just water cured it, no drying first as the mites will destroy the nugs as they dry.

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water cured? never heard of that? how does that work?

It’s a method to make your smoke as smooth as possible, and help leech out any leftover fertilizer and keep bugs/mold from getting to your plants before you get to dry them. Right after harvest, your trim it as much as you normally would when dry, then submerge the entire cola/nugs under room temp water, change the water daily or when ever it gets cloudy. Any water soluble stuff gets leeched out, then when the water remains clear for a couple days, you put the nugs out to dry quickly. You get lighter colored (and weight) end product with less aroma and flavor, but it goes down super smooth.

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That is very interesting… thank you, I had never heard of it done that way before, I might try a few buds this way to see if i notice the difference between bud washing, and water curing…

Bud washing… that’s new to me lol.

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I hadn’t heard of it either till a couple of weeks ago here on OG.


Here’s a link to the thread.

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Hmm, interesting and makes sense for outdoor plants. Just be gentle to not knock off trichromes. The water cure is just submerging the nugs and cola under water and leaching out gunk… plus drowning the mites.

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Seriously,
I outdoor grow, I did it last year with a harvest that had 2 plant severely infected plants, each plant was around a pound harvested and i didn’t want to have to scrap it, so I tried everything and nothing really worked… So I ended up harvesting, and during harvest I decided to try a bunch of different methods to see what the best result was in case it happened again… I should do a write up on this… what absolutely worked was the 4 gallon method described above and I gave them a pretty good dunk and swirl in all 4 buckets, and then hang them to dry, be prepared… IF there are any mites left on the buds hanging them upside down will force them to seek higher source of food as the plants dry…you see them pile up at the end of the stalk… on the buds that were washed there was almost zero mites crawling on the stems at all (some next to unwashed buds had mites so I can’t say 100% it got rid of them all…) but what I didn’t expect was to completely infest my drying room with mites… so that was another ordeal… but what I can say is looking under a eye glass the washed buds look so much more colorful, the buds dried greener looking and you see nothing but leaves and beautiful sparkly tricomes, the flower dries in roughly the same amount of time if you are through with your drying process. The buds that were not washed look dusty and you can see everything that probably lived, pooped and collected on the leaves in the 8-9 months it grew in my greenhouse (indoor plants I would really not see a point as they are filtered air and controlled surroundings) but outdoor grow… my lungs hurt thinking about smoking buds not washed and grown outdoors… it just makes sense now to me and i saw the results first hand am I am sold on the process… everybody grows different and has different results, but one day i will try and get all my photos together and do a write up. I learned a lot last year, that is so far making this year more interesting… Lady bugs have kicked ass over any spray so far… I saw one plant getting mite bites in it’s leaves. they were about The next day i got 2 containers and released them in the dirt under the first 2 plants in the row… and then did 2 more the following week on a couple big plants that I had that i wanted to be sure… they have seriously been doing their job, all new growth since releasing them a month ago is amazing… they are about 5-6 feet now and just now started showing some white pistils… (805 weather) but all the plants have bigger leaves, super dark green, no evidence of mites or anything on the plants for that matter… I did notice a lizard population increase around the greenhouse though… lol… OMG i have been rambling…too many doobies while internet surfing… lol

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Hey everyone haven’t done an update in a while… honestly I have taken a lot of pictures but got stoned every time I took them and spaced posting them. So here is the scoop… Reefer is loving life, I did a 20% water change like 2 weeks ago and constantly checking the pH. The water seems pretty stable, it’s clear, with very little maintenance from me… Reefer gets fed twice a day and his colors are awesome! The plant is looking green as could be, but doesn’t really seem to be getting any bigger or have new growth, but the root growth… holy cow… there is one long ass root that almost touches the bottom of the tank, and there has started poking other roots out the bottom of the bottle as well…just seems weird the plant hasn’t changed at all.

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Hahaha sorry took me 3 times to remove 2 pictures I had already posted… lol damn weed, lucky I remembered to post tonight !!

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