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[MEGA] Every Year's Community Growing advice, tips, tricks, & experiences

Ants that are leaving little black pods behind? Looks like you're going to have a near-future aphid population on your plant.
 
Yeah, they're nothing to do with the ants. You might find the ants don't interfere with your crop. You need to manually remove those disgusting eggs and deal with the problem as if it's an aphid problem mate.
 
holy fuck Im sorry about your ant problem. use a 50/50 white vinegar and water solution for that shit. and pick em off like everyone said. wish you luck!
 
junkie skumbag said:
Hey BL'ers!!!!!

i have a plant out the back fully organic that is about 8 weeks old.Recently some ants have decided to make there home in my soil i tryed drowing them but no success.i went out there today and there is shitloads of black little pod like things along the stem how do i get rid of these???
i had these pod things on my last plants but noway near as bad,i have movved houses seince then and we get really bad ants here

cheers guys heres some photos

http://img64.imageshack.us/f/img0131tg.jpg/
Click to expand...

Looks like the ants may be setting up a aphid farm on your plant!! - They nurture the aphids and harvest their secretions...

http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=e...itle&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CDYQsAQwAg&biw=1024&


I would suggest spray the plant with neem oil (or pyrethrum) to kill the aphids. To prevent the ants commandeering your plant you could wrap sticky fly paper round the base of the stem or utilise some sort of ant repellent - apparently they hate the smell of clove oil.. I read somewhere that chalk deters them aswell..

Good luck!!
 
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The ultimate solution to ant problems is to get a special ultrasonic device that deters them. I personally know someone that sold his house because of ants stealing all his compost heaps (literally!).

As long as it's not near the base of the plant, I would recommend hitting the nuclear button and distributing powder ant killer available at every garden store/plant nursery.

As for the aphids, cold pressed organic neem oil is good, however it depends what stage the plants are in. I personally wouldn't recommend pyrethrum unless you absolutely have to since although it's extracted from a certain flower (just like the poison digitalis from foxglove), it's quite a harsh chemical spray to use (yes it is a chemical spray, just like neem, despite what you may have heard). I am an advocate of pyrethrum - just as second or third line option rather than a first line choice.

If you're in a greenhouse, natural predatory insects are the obvious first choice as if successful, there is no better choice.

If you kill off the aphids your ants won't be attracted to your plants as much as they won't have access to the honeydew they so crave, which is secreted through the aphids anus. A good option is to use Savona soapy solution to kill them off.
 
Artificial Emotion said:
Where are you intaking from? Where are you extracting to (outside?)? What size inline fans are you using? It shouldn't be so hot in your grow room. If it makes you uncomfortable your plant isn't going to like it either.
Click to expand...

i have a double in-let 150ml Y piece into a centrifugal 75w fan, blows like a prostitute giving a head job. with a 85watt fan+carbon filter extraction system, altogether the airflow system is rated to something like 6meters cubed, mines approx 5.
ive been putting a wall fan to take some of the afternoon heat out, its been getting well over 40 degress in there on hot days
thinking about maybe getting some of these cool shades, recomend them?
 
Artificial Emotion said:
Yeah, they're nothing to do with the ants. You might find the ants don't interfere with your crop. You need to manually remove those disgusting eggs and deal with the problem as if it's an aphid problem mate.
Click to expand...

pritty sure it has somthing to with the ants they keep going back n forth making the pods...ima give the vinigar a go today....I'll let you guys know how it goes
 
junkie skumbag said:
pritty sure it has somthing to with the ants they keep going back n forth making the pods...ima give the vinigar a go today....I'll let you guys know how it goes
Click to expand...




I'm 99% sure you're about to have an aphid problem, bro.


Are there a lot of black/dark brown "pods (which would be the egg sacs)? If there's just a few you might be able to ride out the aphid population. They only do real harm when there's masses located on individual plants. With weed a population might even be beneficial because of the ants acting as protectors. If the aphid-count is kept low enough then the aphids won't do any harm and the ants will still defend the hell out of the plant from other insects and, depending on the kind of ant, larger animals as well. If the eggs are completely covering parts of your plant, though, you will have problems with said plant.



On the plus side, if the plant's in a pot then just move it a minimum of 20 feet from where it's sitting, but preferably a lot farther. The aphids will thrive if you allow the ants constant access to them, and moving the plant will confuse the ants or even make them forget the plant if they have other "aphid farms" close to their colony. They'll still live if you move them away from the ant colony, but they'll be much more vulnerable to natural predators around your home (and trust me, there are TONS of bugs that eat aphids and their eggs).






....fuck, I helped my mother garden too much when I was younger.
 
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Artificial Emotion said:
Here's a photo of one of my SmellyBerry plants (UGORG Bluez x Blueberry, an indica-dominant strain).

Please click on the image to enlarge it, otherwise it's too small to make out, really.
Click to expand...
Looking good there AE mate, to me look's a little more on the Sativa side IMO, the girl ive got going is more indica . I think you said you were scrogging, any chance on a photo of your set-up?
 
Thanks for the help guys especially JiBult you explaned alot =D

I sprayed the hell out of the whole plant with 50parts water 50 parts viniger let it siit for about 3 mins then sprayed off with water.I then scraped the majroty of the egg sacks off the stem.they coverd just under a quater of the bottom of step.i will move it around the other side of my house tomorrow.....

Thanks again guys ill get some more photos up tomorrow.

P.S the ants have made a huge nest in my soild at the base of the plant pritty sure there eating the blood n bone n fish i put in the soil :! any pointers of getting rid of those little fuckers...
 
Enjoyed reading this thread & all the links provided. interesting stuff! :)

Sorry i can't answer your question dude.
 
Oh man that doesn't look like a light infiltration. I'd move that plant, as Jib suggested, as far as possible.
 
misteee said:
i have a double in-let 150ml Y piece into a centrifugal 75w fan, blows like a prostitute giving a head job. with a 85watt fan+carbon filter extraction system, altogether the airflow system is rated to something like 6meters cubed, mines approx 5.
ive been putting a wall fan to take some of the afternoon heat out, its been getting well over 40 degress in there on hot days
thinking about maybe getting some of these cool shades, recomend them?
Click to expand...

Sorry to be a pain mate, but coul you tell me what rating those fans are in terms of airflow i.e. CFM or m3/h? If you give those established values it would really help give me a better idea of thiings. Are you sure you have negative pressure in your grow area? This is important. If this isn't sorted out you probably should look at dealing with this before you change your hood.

Remind me where your growing? It's not a tent is it? What are the dimensions (need to know this in relation to fan size).

40 degrees centigrade is, as you no doubt know, way too hot for a plant, let alone a human, so it needs sorting out.

If and only if you live in a very hot climate like near the equator, you could benefit from an air cooled hood, but certainly not a cooltube as they are shit, since their reflector is useless and they don't spread light well at all. The only thing cooltubes are good for are really small spaces where other hoods would not fit and for vertical grows they are king. Don't get me wrong, they do work but there are much better hoods for normal non vertical grows.

The only reason I bought an american Sunsystems Blockbuster a/c hood is because I plan to use CO2 one day. Right now I'm using a parabolic and to be honest, it's the best single purchase I've made for my grow. It gives a cooler room than my Blockbuster (arguably one of the best a/c hoods on the market) by far. If you want to get all fancy, you could use a Grostar (another type of photometrically designed parabolic hoods that mounts the lamp vertically).

With my parabolic hood I can get about 5-6" away from the canopy and due to it's design it covers a much larger area more effectively than most hoods (bar the Grostar). My canopy is only about 2-3C above the temperature at any other point in my tent, so it's absolutely idea for hot places and I think you'll find you get better results with this hood than even an air cooled hood. You wouldn't think it, but it's true.
 
Wise420 said:
Looking good there AE mate, to me look's a little more on the Sativa side IMO, the girl ive got going is more indica . I think you said youe. were scrogging, any chance on a photo of your set-up?
Click to expand...

Thanks mate. Yes it does look like it's more on the Sativa side. I am scrogging and I'll try and get a photo up for you.
 
Artificial Emotion said:
Sorry to be a pain mate, but coul you tell me what rating those fans are in terms of airflow i.e. CFM or m3/h? If you give those established values it would really help give me a better idea of thiings. Are you sure you have negative pressure in your grow area? This is important. If this isn't sorted out you probably should look at dealing with this before you change your hood.

Remind me where your growing? It's not a tent is it? What are the dimensions (need to know this in relation to fan size).

40 degrees centigrade is, as you no doubt know, way too hot for a plant, let alone a human, so it needs sorting out.

If and only if you live in a very hot climate like near the equator, you could benefit from an air cooled hood, but certainly not a cooltube as they are shit, since their reflector is useless and they don't spread light well at all. The only thing cooltubes are good for are really small spaces where other hoods would not fit and for vertical grows they are king. Don't get me wrong, they do work but there are much better hoods for normal non vertical grows.

The only reason I bought an american Sunsystems Blockbuster a/c hood is because I plan to use CO2 one day. Right now I'm using a parabolic and to be honest, it's the best single purchase I've made for my grow. It gives a cooler room than my Blockbuster (arguably one of the best a/c hoods on the market) by far. If you want to get all fancy, you could use a Grostar (another type of photometrically designed parabolic hoods that mounts the lamp vertically).

With my parabolic hood I can get about 5-6" away from the canopy and due to it's design it covers a much larger area more effectively than most hoods (bar the Grostar). My canopy is only about 2-3C above the temperature at any other point in my tent, so it's absolutely idea for hot places and I think you'll find you get better results with this hood than even an air cooled hood. You wouldn't think it, but it's true.
Click to expand...

see the weather here is terrible lately, we have been getting heats up too 41 degrees celcius and humidity up to 80percent. so its been hearder to keep it cooler when its hot out side :(

my room, is a man built box lined with foam insulation dimensions are 3m L x 1.5m W x 2.2m H....
i have thought about perhaps getting a cooler for the room, but im more so worried about the extra electricity, if i end up installing a new cooler ill need to be looking at getting a new electronic circuit installed, mine currently is only rated too 2400watt (10amp) :(

thanks for the info on the cooltubes, they cost a fair bit for me to get 4 new cooltubes id be cheaper off getting an air cooler. as i stated above my exraction fan is 85watt and my inlet is 75watt. both have great new fresh air coming in.

thing is, the plant is growing amazingly well, i am lucky though, the other day a mate gave me a remaining amount of his nutrient called isn microbe- boost... all other isn products are 5ml to every litre so i did this, turns out it only needed 1ml to every litre oppps. didnt burn them luckily.
 
Apart from the power (wattage) of the fans, do they not have the amount of air they can blow through written on them? Most fans in the US have a rating in cubic feet per minute (CFM) or metres cubed per hour (m3/h) as some fans of the same wattage can blow different amounts through.

I wouldn't recommend getting air conditioning as that's expensive to run, as you've found out. Since you're using a built room (not a tent) you would be much better off buying a heat exchanger and just running water from the tap through it from a reservoir, such as a water butt, using a pump. Using one or two of these with air blown onto them with a decent fan will allow you to cool the room with very little running costs. Of course, you might find it difficult to cool using either this setup and also the air conditioner if your're extracting the air away from your room, which is why you might be better off cooling the room your grow box is situated in.

If you're not using a parabolic reflector (which has the bulb mounted vertically rather than horizontally) you will be able to cool the room by quite a bit by changing to one of these reflectors. My parabolic allows me to run the room much cooler than my old adjustawing or even the Blockbuster. It's a good investment and is quite cheap usually.

Also, are you extracting outside or are you just extracting from your box into the house? If so, you really need to be extracting outside (i.e. outdoors).
 
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Here are the images you asked for Wise. Once again, please click on the image to expand it so you can see it properly. It looks like I've just left the plants to grow above the screen, but that's just one day's worth of growth. I weaved all the stems under only yesterday. It's great havin such fast growth, but it's also a damn pain in the arse because it's a lot of work. Next grow I'm going to supercrop in my Amazon aeroponic system and will support the plants using yo yos (not actual yo yos if anyone's wondering).

I'll try and take some photos at lights out if I can time it right so the photos are a bit better.

I'm in NFT which you can see (the white board is the correx on top). This is automatically topped up with a 50% nutrient solution from a water butt so that I don't have to measure pH or EC very often (only a few times throughout the grow) or top up the NFT res with water at all. It's probably one of the easiest ways of growing hydroponically IMO. The fan is extracting air through a Rhino Pro CF to the outside through a box I built over the window. Air is taken in through a 6" intake (same fan as the extraction) and both fans are controlled with an SMS COM twin fan controller. The tent is heated with an 800W oil filled radiator and I'm using a 100cm parabolic reflector. The scrog screen is a budbox utility screen. At some point I plan to experiment with a DIY screen that has slightly larger holes.
----------

misteee said:
see the weather here is terrible lately, we have been getting heats up too 41 degrees celcius and humidity up to 80percent. so its been hearder to keep it cooler when its hot out side :(

my room, is a man built box lined with foam insulation dimensions are 3m L x 1.5m W x 2.2m H....
i have thought about perhaps getting a cooler for the room, but im more so worried about the extra electricity, if i end up installing a new cooler ill need to be looking at getting a new electronic circuit installed, mine currently is only rated too 2400watt (10amp) :(

thanks for the info on the cooltubes, they cost a fair bit for me to get 4 new cooltubes id be cheaper off getting an air cooler. as i stated above my exraction fan is 85watt and my inlet is 75watt. both have great new fresh air coming in.

thing is, the plant is growing amazingly well, i am lucky though, the other day a mate gave me a remaining amount of his nutrient called isn microbe- boost... all other isn products are 5ml to every litre so i did this, turns out it only needed 1ml to every litre oppps. didnt burn them luckily.
Click to expand...

Once again, I want to reiterate that if you're extracting from the grow box/area/whatever into the room it's situated in, the temps are just going to rise and rise and rise. You need to be shifting that air outdoors so the heat doesn't build up. Also, if you're not doing this, the relative humidity will build up and eventually your house will get all mouldy and you'll cause damage.
 
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Jibult said:
Ants actually carry, place and protect the aphid eggs and aphids.

Kind of like a symbiosis. Ahhhhh, Life.... =D



http://insects.about.com/od/coolandunusualinsects/f/antsandaphids.htm
Click to expand...

I don't know what happened to my post but I explained about the how ants eat the honeydew secreted. It disappeared.

edit: I just realised I posted it in the cultivation section. That's why. I must have broken it up for some reason. Here it is:

The ultimate solution to ant problems is to get a special ultrasonic device that deters them. I personally know someone that sold his house because of ants stealing all his compost heaps (literally!).

As long as it's not near the base of the plant, I would recommend hitting the nuclear button and distributing powder ant killer available at every garden store/plant nursery.

As for the aphids, cold pressed organic neem oil is good, however it depends what stage the plants are in. I personally wouldn't recommend pyrethrum unless you absolutely have to since although it's extracted from a certain flower (just like the poison digitalis from foxglove), it's quite a harsh chemical spray to use (yes it is a chemical spray, just like neem, despite what you may have heard). I am an advocate of pyrethrum - just as second or third line option rather than a first line choice.

If you're in a greenhouse, natural predatory insects are the obvious first choice as if successful, there is no better choice.

If you kill off the aphids your ants won't be attracted to your plants as much as they won't have access to the honeydew they so crave, which is secreted through the aphids anus. A good option is to use Savona soapy solution to kill them off.
 
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