Lloyd Johnson - The Beginner's Guide to Growing Marijuana

Other than seeing the spider mites themselves, the first signs of an infestation show up as a scattering of light-colored spots on the plant’s leaves. As the infestation continues, the leaves take on a sickly gray or bronze color, eventually turning yellow and dropping off. The entire plant can become engulfed in spider mite webbing. At that point, destroy the plants and clean and sterilize your grow rooms. See Chapter 9for more in-depth info on spider mites and how to get rid of them.

Deer eating cannabis is primarily a rural grower’s problem, but not always. Outdoor growers in more urban areas know that deer are quite apt to move around at night, particularly in cities with large parks.

The rural grower has more trouble if he lives in a drought-prone area. All that well-watered, green, delicious cannabis is worth a lot of risk to a hungry deer. They will jump very high if they need food. The grower in this area needs to use at least ten-foot fencing—twelve is better and safer.

A grower who lives in a green belt should be less concerned. If you have rose bushes, the deer will prefer them, particularly after the cannabis starts heavily producing resins. A lower fence, even six feet, will suffice. Rural deer do not like to jump into anything that could trap them if they have other food choices. It is only during droughts that they get desperate and take risks to eat fenced-in cannabis plants.

Urban deer in drought areas will frequently wander into enclosed areas. Urban deer are much less afraid of people because no one can shoot at them. Rural deer are more apt to spook; they know that humans have guns and that they frequently use them.

To discourage deer, wind string around in the brush. Again, the deer will not like how traplike the string appears and feels.

Some growers save dog hair from clipping their dogs or get some from a dog-groomer friend. They put it in the brush around an unfenced grow to discourage deer. Another deterrent that sometimes works is sprinkling blood meal around the site.

Tarps or old metal roofing panels laid on the ground around the crop site will discourage deer as well as elk or sheep. The texture and sound make them unwilling to walk across either of these. Just bear in mind that goats have no trouble walking across almost anything, so do not confuse goats with sheep.

Many types of burrowing rodents can take up residence in a garden. Gophers, pocket gophers, moles, and voles are some of the more common ones. Usually you will notice gophers because their tunnel digging creates mounds of fresh earth. These appear very suddenly and are quite large.

Gophers can be quite destructive to plants that are ground planted. They are not really after your cannabis, but they will tunnel right through an unprotected root ball if it appears in their way. The best solution is to line your planting holes with chicken wire, leaving a standing rim of wire at least eight inches in height. This will keep the gophers from making the planting a point of entry, and the lower wire protects the plant’s root ball. The exposed chicken wire will also alert you to remove it should you later till the planting area.

Moles tunnel along just under the surface and are usually not harmful to cannabis plants, unless they get into a large raised bed and cannot figure out how to get out again. The chicken wire gopher solution will work fine for moles, too.

Voles are small rodents, and they sometimes girdle a cannabis plant’s trunk by gnawing away the bark and the cambium around the plant’s trunk or main stalk. This kills the plant by interrupting the circulation of water and nutrients. Protect the stalk with chicken wire.

All of these rodents can be eradicated by a good garden cat. Make certain you get a cat of proven hunting ability, as not all cats are good hunters. Some growers use gopher traps. These can be effective, but always make sure to cover the set trap with a heavy bucket so other animals like pets do not get hurt. Never use poisons.

If you grow in a wooded area, you and your plants may have an encounter with wood rats (genus Neotoma ). These are also known as pack rats or trade rats, and are about the size of the common Norway rat. They have a furry tail; soft, fine fur; large ears; and light-colored feet and bellies.

The first indication you will have of wood rats is that some of your cannabis will be missing branches. Then some more branches will be missing. Wood rats are mostly active at night and feed primarily on green vegetation, twigs, and shoots. Most species of the wood rat family build a large stick den or house on the ground or in trees. Some of these houses are as big as four feet in size. A nest, usually made of finely shredded plant material, is located within the larger house.

First, locate their stick house nest. This is usually fairly easy as the structures are so large. It will not be too far away from your crop site. You will find your cannabis branches neatly woven into the structure. Then, sadly for the wood rats, you must destroy the nest. Sometimes this is sufficient to make the wood rats move on to more friendly territory. Sometimes it’s not.

One grower reported success by setting their cannabis containers inside moated circles. The wood rats that tried to cross the water all drowned, probably because they could not climb out of the slippery plastic sides of the moats. Some growers scatter mothballs around the base of their plants. This has varied success and is not advised due to the chemical nature of mothballs.

Although cannabis is usually very strong, on some occasions a branch will break, either from accident, high winds, or the weight of the colas pulling it down, and it tears from the trunk. If this happens, just take the branch in and hang it to dry and use. Fill the wound left on the trunk with some beeswax. Lower branches that are pulling away can be propped with five-gallon plastic buckets laid on their sides. The weight of the branch holds it in place, and the bucket supports the too-heavy branch. Higher branches can be propped or tied, but this generally has limited success. You can try to see if the plant responds, but it is generally better to cut and treat with beeswax.

Some growers have never had to deal with these little pests; some growers have had episodes and then did not see them again for years. They actually seem more common in outdoor urban grows, perhaps because backyard corn growers are sometimes untidy gardeners and create a habitat for corn earworm moths and their caterpillars. These are small, smooth-skinned, little green caterpillars, generally with a thin white horizontal racing stripe. Their coloration is a perfect camouflage for hiding on cannabis; the green is sativa-green, and the thin white stripe looks like a cannabis flower pistil.

The corn earworms love to bore into cannabis buds, just as much as they love to bore into the tips of growing ears of corn (hence their name). Sometimes, the first indication a grower has that corn earworms are eating the crop is to actually see an apparently healthy large cola drop from the plant to the ground. Cannabis flowers are very firmly attached to the plant; something has to eat through the stem to remove a flower.

A corn earworm is more likely to be seen where corn has been growing. An initial infestation starts because a corn earworm moth lays eggs in the soil. These hatch into the little green caterpillars that eat your cannabis, then drop back into the soil to pupate and become the moth that will then lay the eggs and so on in an elegant cycle.

As soon as you spot the earworms, pop them with your fingers and leave their little corpses on a larger older leaf of the plant. Go over and groom every inch of your plants at least twice a day, handpicking the earworms. The earworms do not seem to attack the leaves of the plants particularly. They treat the cola, or flower, like an ear of tender young corn. Since leaves are starting to die back as the plants produce flowers, you will be grooming the plants every day at this point anyway. Pay more attention to the colas if you have spotted earworms; remember, they like to burrow to the inside of the flower.