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I HATE thrips!

TXCG

TXCG

I went ahead and scrapped all but 1 of the pepper plants I had growing. I kept the mucho nacho hybrid, everything else got tossed as far off the balcony as gravity would allow. Im so pissed, I tried pyretherin spray, neem oil, and something else all to no avail. The little fuckers absolutely mangled all the young leaves and killed all the flowers (thats where I finally located enough of them to ID, i found like 20+ little thrips inside 2 separate flowers!).

After consulting several nurseries, one of them finally found a book that covered killing thrips on food crops. Most reference material called for using a systemic pesticide, which is great for flowers and other things you don't eat, but not so good for food. Anyway, the book suggested using Ortho Sevin spray. So far so good, its been 2 days and the tiny leaves are still un-munched. If this doesn't work, no more friggin peppers on the balcony this season for me.

Oh, the cherry tomato now has 2 main vines each about 5 feet high with countless huge suckers coming off and approximately 30 un-ripe tomatoes with hundreds more flowers.....and not a single bug mark on the whole damn plant :?: They don't touch the blueberry bush, they don't touch any of my stevia plants, they don't touch the tomatoes or any of my random house plants, JUST PEPPERS WTF!@>!>!>.1.1..1`jlk

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DIE THRIPS!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Txclosetgrower said:
DIE THRIPS!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Yeah!


Die! Die! Die!


I hate *spit!* thrips!


*spit!* *spit!* *spit!* *spit!* *spit!* *spit!*


I hate those nasty bastards and their Weapon of Mass Destruction, Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus! It wiped out my tomato crop the first three years I lived in this house. I had to cut down all the mulberry-less mulberry trees they were using as a base of operations before I could even begin to get a handle on the problem. I'd treat the garden, and they'd launch air strikes from the nearest mulberry-less mulberry tree to re-infest.

Their life cycle is so short, it was impossible to get ahead of them, and there aren't any really good beneficials that prefer *spit!* thrips. I alternated Neem and Monterey Garden Insect Spray to keep them under control.

You have my condolences.
 
That's it, no more peppers for me this season, I just made it to the shit-canning step of that flow-chart. I just tossed the remaining 4 after their new growth already shows signs of distortion, curling, etc with the baby leaves that aren't even unfurled at all yet showing dark marks from damage/disease or whatever the hell is causing this. I'm sick of dealing with it. Too much time and money have been wasted for one season, maybe I'll finally set up a hydro system indoors under lights like I've been meaning to. Everything I grow inside does fine, it's just when I take the plants outside they get their asses kicked. And by "the plants" it is exclusively referring to peppers. Hell, even my carrots are doing fine, aside from the mushrooms that keep sprouting in their pot, even though I tried to kill the shrooms w/ hydrogen peroxide.

So i'm no longer a pepper grower, at least not this season, im pissed clean off about it too.
 
Txclosetgrower said:
That's it, no more peppers for me this season, I just made it to the shit-canning step of that flow-chart. I just tossed the remaining 4 after their new growth already shows signs of distortion, curling, etc with the baby leaves that aren't even unfurled at all yet showing dark marks from damage/disease or whatever the hell is causing this. I'm sick of dealing with it. Too much time and money have been wasted for one season, maybe I'll finally set up a hydro system indoors under lights like I've been meaning to. Everything I grow inside does fine, it's just when I take the plants outside they get their asses kicked. And by "the plants" it is exclusively referring to peppers. Hell, even my carrots are doing fine, aside from the mushrooms that keep sprouting in their pot, even though I tried to kill the shrooms w/ hydrogen peroxide.

So i'm no longer a pepper grower, at least not this season, im pissed clean off about it too.
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Sorry to hear about that, it's a hard loss to deal with.

Txclosetgrower said:
aside from the mushrooms that keep sprouting in their pot, even though I tried to kill the shrooms w/ hydrogen peroxide.
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Do the stems bruse to a blue color when broken?
 
the picture of the kid is funny as can be, it could become a classic in its own right ;)

oh yea, sorry to hear you're giving up on growing peppers this year.
 
LUCKYDOG said:
Then I'd ask you for some spores :lol:
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Ya know, you can get those off the interenet. The only state that it is illegeal to ship "these particular spores" to is California (well, last time I checked). Plus, most of the ones you'll find ship them in a special "spore distrubuting seringe" that makes it even easier to grow the fungus because it is an extremely sterile enviroment that the spore are ejected from......................
 
imaguitargod said:
Ya know, you can get those off the interenet. The only state that it is illegeal to ship "these particular spores" to is California (well, last time I checked). Plus, most of the ones you'll find ship them in a special "spore distrubuting seringe" that makes it even easier to grow the fungus because it is an extremely sterile enviroment that the spore are ejected from......................
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very interesting.... I used to get them at the Dead and Phish shows in the parking lot this is so much sterile hmmmmm....

busy looking
 
I always try a few new varieties of tomatoes each year, and this year one of those varieties was Ponderosa. Last night I was out in the garden, and both the Ponderosa plants had the curled leaves that signal a *spit!* thrip infestation. Argh!

I pulled them up and will replace them with a Mexico or something. They could recover from the *spit!* thrip damage, but once the Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus starts, it can take your whole garden.
 
Sickmont said:
Time to go out and get a boatload of pirate bugs, folks.
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Yabut...after they run out of *spit!* thrips, don't they bite people?

My neighbors have graciously put up with my eccentricities thus far, but I start releasing swarms of biting bugs, they might just get annoyed.
 
They'll bite the snot out of you even before they run out of prey. I used to think they'd take a look at me and see a thirty-story tall hot dog and make a go for it.
 
Sickmont said:
They'll bite the snot out of you even before they run out of prey. I used to think they'd take a look at me and see a thirty-story tall hot dog and make a go for it.
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Well, ok, I don't need another biting bug here in South Carolina. We already have plenty. I'll find other ways to deal with the *spit!* thrips.
 
*spit!* Thrip Control Update.

I was puttering around the web, reading about the yellow sticky cards that you can use to control aphids and whitefly, when I stumbled across blue sticky cards that are supposed to help control *spit!* thrips.

http://www.biconet.com/traps/stickyTraps.html

I've ordered some, and I'll let you know how I think it works.
 
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