seen talk of spider mites and crap. You know most bugs can be killed with BTK, like aphids and thrips. fungus gnats are harmless. You can kill them too with BTK. Used dichlorvos aka VX gas to kill spider mites. That doesn’t work all the time.I studied them and the mites can even resist the most deadly nerve agent. OK crops infested and what do you do? cut em down and make hash - they are ruined. Then take your clones and protocol 0 them. Oh you might even hear talk of protocol 0 around the water cooler…
To break the infection cycle you have to keep from contaminating your crops, as well. Bugs come from other plants, or are sitting on your head when you walk inside. Clean yourself off before you visit the plants. Then use protocol 0 to clean up the clones by stripping off the leaves and anything on the roots. Take the stick and submerge it in water for 30min. Spray it off with the vegetable sprayer. Slam it in hydro…or whatever. Make sure you do that with all your plant material and anything someone gives to you. Contamination is your enemy, don’t allow pests to drive you to dangerous chemicals like abamectin or dichlorvos. I mean, if you are unleashing btk I can understand - that shit’s not dangerous. just fucking expensive. Any questions?
Got a pic? You mean stripping off all leafs? Or 90% and not topping your now stick
This photo was taken a day after I had stripped everything off. You gotta leave at least 1 meristem “growing tip”
I think you really are mistaken with your advice. If by BTK you are referring to Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki I am sure you are mistaken with your advice. Bt var.k does not kill aphids or thrips.
Here’s a label of Dipel DF. See if you can find the insect larvae it does control. Scroll down to section 10.1 and tell me more about your Protocol 0.
Fungus gnat are harmless to plants above ground, but it’s the larvae that cause damage. Seedlings and cuttings will have a tough time developing roots when there is a fungus gnat population. Your BTK will work then.
hehheh I knew someone would say btk doesn’t work like that. Don’t worry, you don’t have to believe me! It’s amazing stuff… I have used it to kill: earwigs, aphids, thrips, gnats, slugs…errrr oh yah those stupid caterpillars on the tree. You just have to try it and see what it kills, the list is huge. Probably kills snails as well. It will not kill spider mites, sorry. But btk isn’t part of protocol 0.
Just scrub your plants good like you’re scrubbing up for surgery - that’s basically all there is to protocol 0.
but back to the btk… even my relatives…like for example my uncle, I told him to kill those stupid aphids on his plum tree with BTK. He’s like you read the label? it doesn’t kill those things. and I responded with “it’s more an extinction level event as opposed to killing…” 
Soapy water kills aphids. They’re easy. Thrips are hard.
Valent would be very happy to add thrips to their Dipel label if it killed thrips.
well, for sure, I love to kill the aphids by squishing them, it’s so satisfying! Same with caterpillars, I love to squish em! ooo good squishin!
They put this crud in a white bottle now, but it’s the same thing. Kind of a tan sludge, you dilute with water. There is no end to the uses for this stuff, you seriously have to try it on some lame bug. Like earwigs! For thrips, impregnate the ground with the btk spray it on the plants if you want, but the ground is important. Some thrips can complete a lifecycle on the plant leaf. I love squishing them too!!! Don’t be scared of the toxic protein it’s harmless to mammals. Don’t spray it on your buds and smoke it - gross. If your mite infestation is like off the hook in bloom mode, you blew it human. Got to keep scanning for signs of life during the grow - head that off asap. On my peppers and apple tree as well as the plum tree I can spray a nice stream of btk way up there on the curled and infested leaves. Pretty soon, it’s like genocide… aphids are toast. It’s a falsifiable theory, so give it a whirl. This isn’t protocol 0 though. Protocol 0 works only on clean-rooms. The cycle must be broken to prevent any further infestations.
I agree with this guy
ahh the irony is I would have agreed with this dude billy bud or whoever he is…like even 3 years ago. Protocol 1 was never bring plant material into the grow from outside. But then I got thinkin…bear with me here… if I can go and have a shower, and wash all the shitbugs off, why can’t the plant?
My Story:
I could see the mites under the microscope, crawling and shedding their skins… laughing at me!!! LAughing! Their little eggs secured by a thin strand of silk. All the while secure in their knowledge they were the alpha dog in the room. Enter superman two feet and a heartbeat! plus two eyes…mm and I spose a brain. I poisoned em. I bathed em. I fried their asses with chemicals, I froze them into popsicles. Each time… I could see their beady eyes looking back at me… taunting me with their presence! I was fucking suicidal…shoulda followed protocol 1…everything is in ashes. What am I gonna do? Then I got hypothesis “final solution” if I went and cleaned everything just like I was scrubbing clean, the mites should be dead. And I can see…see them…and their beady eyes. Eventually it evolved into what I call protocol 0 because it replaced protocol 1. Protocol 1 was keep all plants and material out, so protocol 0 was surgical scrub plants then allow them in. I could see under the 'scope the little buggers…had gone away. no beady eyes, no eggs. Victory is assured.
I know accepting new ideas is hard, but I didn’t make this research project up. I was seriously suicidal about the infestation that couldn’t be killed with any poison on the face of the earth, and don’t think I didn’t try them all and probably get exposed to cancer causing shit in the process.
fungus gnats i thought BTi
oo bti is my friend as well. But I admit I use the BTK for all applications in the garden. The BTK wasn’t good for the gnats but it didn’t kill them like it killed the thrips. The gnats always reinfested super quick somehow. PRobAbly bti woulda finished them off better! I guess in the organic culture I was always adding new organic material that wasn’t infested with BTK.
I can attest to this. Had some difficulty rooting a cutting. Ripped open the rapid rooter and found fungus gnat larvae chomping away. Scorched earth on my humidity dome and try again.
I can see your point…no pun intended! The thing that would bother me would be weak genetics like clones off of clones of clones so in the end you got a clone 12 times removed from the seed mother. Which would be a weak plant and if you have invested a lot of time and effort into your grow why chance it right? Plus if you were that deep into you wouldn’t need that one clone you’d be bringing in 500 of them. I guess if you trusted the source where it came from and the other issues like PM now that would suck. Weak plants like weak people i really got no time for them. Its like core values…if we have core values we wont get into situations where we get fkd over. Like the story i heard here the other day the guy had PM and told the other guy “its not that bad” WHAT its bad period! Right but to that guy because of his core values it really wasn’t that bad. So it comes down to our values. Some guys would have no problem dumping a load on top of some other guy in his GF…me i would have a problem with that. You see how our values play into all of our decisions…do i want weak plants in my garden? NO Its like women i don’t care how hot she thinks she is if she is a pain in the ass she’s got to go! I completely understand what your saying and i see your core values…Im not risking my health for a clone of some “killer” stuff.
There may be off target overlap, but BTK is better at killing Lepidoptera and BTI for Diptera due to differences in the toxins they produce.
actually bandit does bring up a point about cloning. In the cloning test over a couple decades I generated a 100th generation clone from a clone they were all good. I really wonder IF they would lose vigor, but the thing I’ve noticed is grape vines can be cloned over hundreds of years span and still be ok. Oh and they are doing that kind of thing with strawberries. Just make sure all clones are clean 
In my opinion, genetic drift is really just old, sick plants. If you keep your mums happy and healthy, the clone will be identical to it. If your mom is sick, has a virus, etc, the clone will also be sick.
I got rid of mites using a similar technique. I chopped all my moms down to one tiny branch with a leaf and ran them under the shower every day for about 2 weeks. Much easier to keep them clean when they’re small!
My “Protocol 0” is a 30 day quarantine. The quarantine area is 16"x16" tent that is setup in my bathroom.
- Assume the cutting is contaminated.
- Maintain a weekly IPM schedule including inspection with a microscope.
- Never take in media, recut clones if already rooted.
- Always interact with the quarantine tent last.
- No shoes, hats, or glasses when working with the quarantine tent.
- Always shower and change clothes immediately after working with the quarantine tent.
@ReikoX ooof! yah you are describing the lengths I had to go to, in order to study the protocol. Bringing in infectious disease then playing with it, to see how it dies, is always risky. 
DANGER! I put up bio-hazard signs and containment protocols. Then you are like that guy on the bone collector, someone’s knocking at the door to disrupt your experiment. Ooooooooo, now that gets me steamed. Call me names, kick over my buckets…but hell…never disrupt my experiments!!!
I made some photos to go with this write up that shows the entire process. You can do it with plants with roots as well. Bigger plants… they are hard to fit in a sink 
You might be able to pull it off, but no guarantees. I’ll also explain how to construct a basic clean room. I made my own, but also got tips from Clair Cameron Patterson’s initial attempts to keep lead contamination out of his lab. If you want to watch the cosmos episode it’s pretty sweet.
Step one: get contaminated plant/cutting, with or without roots.
Step two: Strip the plant/clone down so there are no leaves. I also wash off the medium if it has some, but you can cut the clone right out of the medium if you really want. Roots optional.
Step three: submerge in water for 30min. Them bugs aren’t exactly…aquatic?
Step four: rinse off your clone/plant. I use a vegetable sprayer and rough handling
I used the sink tap in the photo.
Now you just complete the cloning process. The plants themselves can take…lots of rough handling. As long as the stem isn’t destroyed and a meristem exists, the plant will live. The meristem is the tiny growth shoot sort of right on the side of a plant growth node. Yo, someone needs to upgrade the dictionary here to include technical terms.