How to take care of Leaf Miners – Cannabis Plant Care
Leaf miners! You can spot them burrowing their ugly little ‘whatever-the-fucks!’ in the leaves, which if left untreated can lead to severe damage to the crop. As with any unwanted situation with your plants – you’ll always want to deal with these situations sooner than later.
For the novice cannabis growers out there who suddenly started spotting some gnarly patterns on their leaves, maybe a few bites here and there – let’s take a look at how you can deal with leaf miners.
Identifying Leaf Miners
As with any pest – the first step is identifying what pest you are dealing with. No two pests are alike and potentially you’d have to take a different approach depending on which pest you are waging war against.
Firstly – not all leaf miners are alike either. There are several different types of leaf miners, however, for the most part their damage looks the same. For the most part – leaf miners are the larva of some unnamed “non-descript” black fly. Since most of the sources call them “non-descript” I decided that “fucky-shit-flies” seemed to be the most suitable and appropriate label [FSFs for short].
Most of the time you know you’re dealing with a leaf miner when there are squiggly lines within the leaf or yellow spots. This is where the micro-worm is munching through the plant – leaving a trail of slime and shit in its wake. Perhaps not so explicitly – but we need a villain and the nefarious leaf miner seems to fit the bill. The evil spawn of the FSFs!
Will the Spawn of the FSF kill my crops?
While this particular pest isn’t after your crops and in most cases won’t get out of control – they do make your plant less efficient in growing and more vulnerable to other diseases. Think of it as “open wounds” on your plants leaf – increasing the odds of pathogens and ‘other-nasties’ to infect or kill the plant.
If you’re growing in a semi-controlled environment, you could probably get away with it. I have seen full grown harvests with leaf-miner damage on it – the bud smoked just as well.
However, if you are a grower looking to crop out the best smoke you can smoke – you’ll probably not stand for – “Let’s see how it goes”.
You’re probably here looking for some sort of answer and all the other blogs that talk about it didn’t give you a satisfactory answer. Well – THAT CHANGES RIGHT NOW!
How to STRAIGHT-UP-MURDER the nefarious spawn of the FSFs!
To get rid of a pest that is using your plant as their “protective shell” – you need to outwit the little fuckwits. Some blogs I read said, “Just cut the infected leaf and it will diminish the outbreak” and this is true.
If you have seriously damaged leaf – it’s best to get rid of it. Just like “forgiving people of their past offenses” is more about setting yourself free from a toxic past – so is cutting defective leaf from a healthy plant.
So one of the first things you can do is get rid of those gnarly looking leaf. BUT – DO NOT THROW IT AWAY!
Instead – put it in a Ziploc bag and monitor it for a few days. The moment you see a little black fly or a FSF – you’ll know it’s time to start spraying some general purpose insecticide.
OH WAIT –
IMPORTANT NOTICE – If you’re in the FLOWERING STAGE….DO NOT USE INSECTICIDE OR PESTICIDE. Rather, just cut the infected leaf and let it go – you don’t want to be putting in any poisons on your plant at this stage.
In the VEGETATIVE STAGE – the moment you see one of the FSFs in the Ziploc bag, spray your plants for 2-3 days in order to kill all the unwanted spawn.
Check if you were effective
A few days later – you should have no problems with the leaf miners any more. But if you do – then you’ll have to give your plant a week or two to recoup and then you can repeat the process.
For those who are in the FLOWERING STAGE – you can introduce beneficial insects like ladybugs to help if the leaf miner problem gets difficult to manage. It probably won’t come to that since Leaf Miners aren’t the “deadliest” pests a cannabis plant can face. It does look like shit and compromises the overall health of your plant which is not optimal – but, it’s typically not the end of the world when you run into these little twats.
Nonetheless – it’s always a good idea to make sure your plant has everything she needs – and getting rid of Leaf Miners will only benefit your grow. I hope that this article gave you some insight on how you can start dealing with the problem. If it didn’t work for you – let me know and let’s strategize on how we can save your plants!
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