Pest Free Indoor Gardens

There will be pain achieving pest free indoor gardens. Make no mistake. If you are basically always fighting cannabis pests indoors, getting and staying pest free will be a bit hard; but not too hard. Especially when you consider the perks baybee. Big perks!

My gardens are totally pest free, and almost always are. About once every 3 to 5 years I have an invasion of something like Powdery Mildew, or Spider Mites. I address these quickly and eradicate them using some harsh methodology (The Nuking) you’ll see below. Once you run pest free for a time, you will never want to look back. The differences are monumental when it comes to your final product.

Landrace genetics like in the photo above are particularly susceptible to parasites indoors. If you are starting up a new indoor cannabis garden, I will show you how to avoid getting pests. For those of you sick of fighting parasites all the time and smoking the sub-par results, the path forwards will have some pain, but giant pleasures! Let’s give this puppy a read, shall we…

The Nuking, for Pest Free Indoor Gardens

This is going to hurt a little. Just thinking about doing this will cause anxiety for some of you—LoL—and I know about this all too well myself. The truth as I see it after growing for just about half a century, 30+ years indoors, is that without using dangerous poisons, you won’t eradicate most parasites. You will only control them for a short time. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take a hard pass when it comes to smoking neurotoxins. Here’s how we do da nuke…

1. Kill all cannabis plants in all of your indoor spaces. Recycle them or whatever. Also, I would remove any remotely suspect houseplants from the indoor spaces, even ones outside the grow rooms.
2. Use a cool-water vaporizer in your gardens with a water and bleach (straight up bleach no additives) mixture of 1 tablespoon of bleach per 1-gallon of water. Make sure all the venting (air exchange and air movement) is running, and set the vaporizer on about 1/3^rd power. Let it run for 3 days, refilling if needed.
3. Boom! You are clean baybee; 3 days is all it takes. The bleach will break down into natural molecules quickly; so, don’t worry about that. That was simple, next let’s look at some nuances to avoid future invasions. Let’s make your pest free indoor garden the new norm.

The Good Guys

Here’s a great rule of thumb when spotting potential pests around your plants. If they are not physically on the plant, or roots, and just in the soil, it’s highly likely they are good guys. There are all kinds of mites, and larva, and mini-beasties in your soil. 99.9% of them are awesome and contribute to your killer buds in the end. So, don’t freak out every time you see some crazy mini-beasties around your plant. For some additional info regarding my take on Fungus Gnats, here’s a link: Fungus Gnats in Cannabis Growing – Skunk Magazine!

It’s true there are some things like “bad” micro-nematodes that can do harm, mini-Root Aphids, and a few others that can really put a big buzz-kill on your garden. Importing clones is the way these parasites come into most gardens, most of the time. Just say no to starting with clones and save yourself big future headaches.

If you are doing – The Nuking – and you suspect your recycled soil has any chance of having parasites, you have to dump it all and start over with new soil. Otherwise, if you know your soil is all good, you can keep using it no worries. Living soil gets better and better every time you recycle it TLO style ♻

Keeping Pest Free Indoor Gardens Truly Free

I’ll give you some handy bullets below. Many of these really helped me bigtime, long ago when I decided it was time to get rid of the pests for good. Change is hard. Choosing a less convenient option is hard sometimes. Like starting from seeds rather than importing clones from someplace. Clones, are usually infected with something, in my experience. No matter how they are represented. Unless you know for a fact, they are truly Clean-Clones, do not start your garden with imported clones. Start from seeds and make your own clones. Here’s a cool place to grab some exotic cannabis seeds: Kingdom Organic Seeds!

Handy Bullet List for Staying Pest Free

• #1: Time your photoperiods to allow you to do everything in your gardens shortly after getting out of bed in the morning. Once you have been outside doing things, percentage chances for you bringing parasitic hitchhikers back, and into your gardens rises significantly.
• #2: Have a special pair of shoes just outside your garden(s) you can slip into before entering if you have already been outside that day. Shoes are major when it comes to transporting parasitic hitchhikers from outdoors, indoors! Yikes alert here for sure.
• #3: No pets that go outside should be allowed anywhere near your gardens, especially in them.
• #4: Do not purchase any new houseplants, and closely inspect any existing ones, that live under the same roof as your cannabis garden(s). This is a sneaky one, especially responsible for Powdery Mildew infections.
• #5: Don’t put your plants outside for some sunshine or whatever, and them bring them back inside. You are at some decent risk here of bringing parasites, or even viruses back in with the plants. I have seen this happen in the past, and had it happen to me (parasites) a couple times as well.
• #6: Never, ever, visit another cannabis garden and then go into your own garden without a shower and a change of clothes first. Never let friends visit your gardens unless they are fresh out of bed (or the shower) and have been nowhere else; especially if they have cannabis gardens themselves!
• #7: Always use passive garden intake venting if possible; and it almost always is. Venting lights directly works well for this purpose too. Always use good filtering on any intake vents feeding directly from the outside. I myself use passive intake venting from my house not directly from outside.

Let’s Summarize the Pain and Pleasure

Alright, I get it, killing everything is especially hard-core for many of you. To make an omelet ya gotta break a few eggs baybee. All I can tell you is that it will be well worth it. As long as you can do what’s necessary to stay pest free. You have to be sort of OCD about these rules. Once you force yourself to practice them for a short time, they become habits. It all gets much easier at that point.

Not having to give a crapola about pests is a paradigm shifting move. Pest free indoor gardens mean pest-treatment free buds. Night and day quality adjustment upwards, to say the least. Yields, resin production, terpenes, and growth rates all come way-way up. Think hard about it, it’s cannabis-paradise on the other side. It should go without saying that you must also remove any hanging plants from the growing area as well. They can stay infected for weeks with mites, and longer with Powdery Mildew.

Are we having fun yet? Heh heh, I hope you enjoyed the article today. I’ll be back here next Tuesday with another one right here at SKUNK! L8r G8rs…

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