🚫 TOP FIVE MISTAKES in Pest Management, with Matthew Gates

11:45AM Jan 28, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

pest management

IPM mistakes

root zone treatment

scouting importance

preventative spraying

biological controls

pest identification

soil drenching

thrips control

spider mites

fungus gnats

rice root aphids

horticultural oils

microbial bio pesticides

pest history

Greetings cultivators worldwide. Jordan River here back with more. Grow cast your best friend in the garden. Today, we've got Matthew gates, IPM, pest specialist, very excited to do this episode with Matthew. We've got a Pesta Palooza coming in July. That's right, we've got a new schedule this year, so stay tuned for updates on that. Today, Matthew is here to talk about mistakes in the grow. You don't want to make these mistakes. Make sure to note them. See if you're committing any of these and tighten up that game. Plug any leaks in your IPM game. It could mean the difference between an amazing harvest or total crop loss. So I know you're gonna love this episode with Matthew. But before we jump into it, quick, shout out to AC infinity. That's right, they make the best grow gear on the market. Acinity.com, code grow cast one five saves you 10% that is the maximum discount we've had the code forever. We've been partners with AC infinity for years. And why? It's because they make the best tents you can get your hands on. They make the best inline fans, the best oscillating fans. They make really, really great quality accessories like scissors, pots, Ratchet hangers and things like that. And now they also have lights. They've got the ion board and now the ion frame bar style, really, really great stuff at AC infinity. Get the whole grow kit you've been after. You know, you can get a three by three kit, a five by five kit. You know you want another one, just go ahead and pop over there. Use code grow, cast one five, always at checkout for the max discount. And thank you for supporting us and AC infinity. We love them so much. They make our favorite grow gear out there. I'm looking at two AC infinity tents in my bio dome, and you won't regret grabbing one. Use code grow, cast one five at AC infinity.com. Thank you to AC infinity. All right, let's get into it with Matthew gates, thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners, you are now listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in again today before we get started. As always, I urge you to share this show. Turn a grower onto growcast podcasts, the best way you can help us out, or turn someone on to growing helps us on our mission of overgrow. Make sure you're subscribed. And of course, go to growcast podcast.com to see all the stuff. Membership, seeds classes, it's all there, everybody. Thank you for your support, especially you grow cast members. Today we have return. Friend of the show, guest of the show, IPM expert, Matthew gates is back to talk about IPM mistakes today. What's up? Matthew, how are you doing? Man, I'm doing really good. Yeah, I like to hear it, brother, you stay in dry in San Diego as it floods down there in SoCal,

there have been some severe flooding, but right now, as we speak, I'm looking at a very typical blue sky San Diego. Haha, February is when it gets the most rainy. In my experience living here most of my life, what happens

to the pests when all that rain comes down? Man, here, here in Molokai, like, stuff happens when the heavy rain comes, you know, all the frogs come out and stuff like that. Do you see as a, as a Bug Guy, any big changes when the monsoon comes in?

Yeah, well, fortunately, it doesn't get quite monsoon like. But right now, the major problem is that with the pest, there's like a there's a balance and a counterbalance effect. On the one hand, the humidity, first of all, the rain, can be very disruptive. So in some ways, that's that can be beneficial to you. There are insects that will be, like, kind of disturbed by this, but some, like ants, for example, which, you know, not a huge like agricultural pest, but they can be ancillary. They will start to create the spawning reproductives around this time too, because it's easier to burn the the ground.

Oh, that makes sense. Okay, see them all come up after the rain and then burrow. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,

so. But I would say that, like on the whole like, there are some things like powdery mildews actually don't do well in the rain. A lot of the spores will die because they'll be over saturated with water. But if the colonies survive, then the the humidity that you get after the rain, when the sun comes back, right, that is beneficial for the spores, because it helps them. There's a there's a reaction for their release, and as things do dry down, you do have, like, a nicer environment, so they don't need moisture like a lot of fungal spores do. So that was something I was talking with a client about recently with regards to, like, predicting powdery mildew in their grow

Yeah, they'll wait for that bloom after the rain. If they're still, uh, they're still viable, that makes sense. Man, well, we hope that you're doing well down there today we are discussing very cool topic. We're going to go over mistakes when it comes to pest management. I love talking about this sort of thing. Man, mistakes you make in your grow, mistakes you make in your IPM schedule. People. We're going to go through five of them. I know you guys are going to learn something and take away some really good information from this episode before we jump into all these mistakes. Though. Matthew, anything you need to update us on, what have you been up to? New videos working on that book. Just give us a little update of all things in Matthew gates world,

yeah. So one thing that I'm working on, is a video that I'm and also kind of like does tie in with the book as well, because a lot of the logic and theory of the book, which is about combating this sort of concept I use, called the ever swarm, which is this basically array of adaptive effects, pests and pathogens and things like this, you got to understand that, basically, you're always going to be dealing with this chaotic, mutating, adapting thing. So you can't always rely on one thing, essentially for treatment. You got to be preventative and reactive, and you don't want to rely too much on any one selection pressure, because we see some very extreme things that have happened, even without human selection, but in any ways, not to get too much into it. But the video is about how the pests that we've seen now in cannabis the surveys, and there's enough information now that we can make some predictions about what we see in 2024 and onward, based on like geographic location and the weather and things like this. So I actually going to be deep diving into those various pests that have been most seen in the various geographic regions, mostly in the USA, but it might talk about some other places like South Africa and parts of China, for example, and Western Europe. Wow, very

cool, man. Well, that plays into some of what we're going to talk about today, some of the points we're going to get into touch on those very aspects. So let's start with the first one. Though. Here you ready to dive in? We got five mistakes. I'm sure you see a lot of mistakes out there, man. I mean, listen, when you dive so much into one subject, you have all these different strategies in your head, all the all these different pieces of information and and all this knowledge in your head. So when you go around to grows, I'm sure there's stuff popping off all the time in your head, like, oh, would like to see you do that better or do this a little bit different. But these five that we've picked out, these are basically universally true. These are mistakes that you don't want to be making, that we'll be able to enlighten the listener on and show them instead how to do best practices, which is what we want with IPM. Always best practices with IPM. Right? Matthew, exactly. Let's get into the first one here. I see this a lot. You know, when someone discovers a pest, that's when you need to, like you say, react and make sure you up the pressure. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see growers making, Matthew, is they'll find a pest, they'll get it identified. Maybe they shoot you a tweet. Say, Hey, what is this? You'll identify the pest, and then they'll go to treat it. Maybe they even use the right product to treat the pest, but they end up treating the wrong area. They don't treat the root zone when they should, and they only treat the canopy or vice versa. They don't apply in the right place for the attack to work. Can you talk about treating the right area and which pests are going to require you to treat canopy

roots, or both? Absolutely. First thing that comes to my mind is something like rice root aphid, super common in cannabis, and one of the things that makes it so problematic, I would say at this point, it's probably known by a lot more, a lot of people. I'm not sure how to quantify this, but I think people have heard of the rice root aphid at this point, which is the score for, you know, information moving around into the community. That's very important. It's important to share all this info. But they're inconspicuous. They can be in the root zone, and people don't know to check. And they get a bunch of cuttings and suddenly they have registered. If it's or somebody just makes, you know, a calculated decision. Maybe they know better, but they think that, like the the risk is better than there's more. You know, is it more valuable to get the reward the risk is worth it? Yeah, right, yeah, that doesn't always pan out.

Oh, that's a really good point. And so you know, whether it's bringing cuttings in and doing your quarantine Protocol, or what have you, maybe you've got these rice root aphids in your root zone. And what do you do? You do a foliar dip, or you spray your plants with wettable sulfur, and you go, I sprayed them three days in a row with Dr zymes. You know they're good to go. No, you didn't touch that root zone, which is where the right rice root aphids are going to live. Also, when you see the flyers, that's another big mistake I see people make with fungus gnats. Is like, Oh, here's a flying pest. Let me spray these fungus gnats. No. If you see either of those pests flying around, you need to attack the root zone immediately. The flyers are almost inconsequential, right? Matthew.

I would say that, especially in cases where people have a small like in the home grow situation, in a commercial situation, I think that it becomes a little bit more important as the scale grows larger. But like I talked about my big, ultimate aphid analysis video, you're right. Like the most important thing is to kill the reproductive females, the things making the most babies. They're born pregnant, and they reproduce asexually. So if you smash the population at that root, you know, then you have to do moth up of different areas, which you should be doing anyways. Actually, to be honest, in most cases, there's no reason at scale to not do this. But if you're in a home growth setting, like they're going to get to the other like, two or four, if it's a smaller grow, you know, so it doesn't really matter. Just attack the the roots and the reproductives and the foliage. Yeah,

that's a good point. But neglecting the roots is neglecting the reproducing females. Like you said, you're never going to solve your problem if you don't get in there, get at those roots, particularly with rice root aphids, fungus gnats. I'm trying to think of other ones that fall into that category where you must, must drench the soil. Well,

one thing that's really helpful for like thrips, for example, it's known that, like in other crops, and also in cannabis, like Western flower thrips and some other thrips species that have been found, they have a sort of like intermediate stage. It's not like a chrysalis, but sometimes people use that verbiage, but it basically, kind of becomes inactive, like a pupa, almost, and it then develops into the adult. So it's right before adulthood. And so when they become immobile, in some cases, they can be vulnerable to bio controls, but also they can fall into the substrate. So the ones that would only be on the foliage, like lace wing larvae, for example, they're not going to make contact with some of them. And then they'll become adults with wings, so they can fly around, and then they can move. And that's why, one of the reasons why thrips are so pernicious, because, also they're so tiny that if you have a small, you know, opening or something, some sort of vulnerability, it's easy for them to get in. And this happens at scale frequently. That

makes a lot of sense. Thrips is another great example, because, like you said, with thrips, you have to be treating both the canopy and the roots pretty vigorously. Like thrips kind of just crawl around and wander right? Not only like you said, are they dropping from the foliage to the pot, but I tend to see like rogue thrips, maybe more often than than other things, they get around your grow tent and around the medium and up and down the stock and in the canopy. That's a really, really important one. I like to use spinosad. Shout out to the members out there who said, you know, I've used spinosad for other things, but I didn't realize it works so well on thrips. And there's even soil drenching instructions. You know, some people don't want to soil drench with the spinosad because of testing that's been done on extracts and things of that nature. But if you are comfortable with that product, I like to use that one, and I hit it on the canopy and on the root zone, because, like you said, they're all over the place, those thrips. That's when I see people making a mistake, too, where they'll just spray the canopy and then the thrips keep coming back

as an alternative, right? If somebody didn't want to use something like that for what are the some of the reasons you might have mentioned you could use the sanity meth elseia nematodes, or SF nematodes, because when you apply them into the substrate, they basically hunt for the pre pupa, and they'll actually attack other things too, like fungus that larvae. So you can get kind of a two for one effect, if you happen to have thrips and fungus gnats, for example. Really good point. That's one thing you could do, too. You could also use rove beetles as well. I do believe robetels will attack few pupa thrips, if I remember correctly. But to be honest, I don't think I would get necessarily rove beetles if I didn't exalt I think the nematodes are more direct and more effective. I think they're maybe more economical too, most of the time, but you really want to, like armor, plus your situation, you could potentially apply them to, yeah,

and good call, anything that needs to be taken care of in the soil in larval stage, hit him with those predatory nematodes. Or, I think even they're like, they're like, bacteria feeders that just eat the bacteria around some of these pests and, like, in their brains and stuff. But, um, the triple threat. I like the triple threat comes with three different species, which all eat different things, and then one of them being the SF nematodes. Like you said, good stuff. Man, really, really good advice. Conversely, some pests, you don't need to worry so much about the soil. I see people thinking about doing soil drenches sometimes for canopy pests, like, oh, I have canopy aphids. And they think that they that all aphids are the same, right, and that they're also in the soil, or even things like spider mites. That's one of the. Reasons I like battling spider mites and canopy aphids. And tell me if this is a mistake. But it seems like they're they largely like to get up towards the top right, where it's warm, where you can easily spray them. I don't worry them so much like living inside of my soil. Mix. Tell me if that's a if that's a big mistake on

my part. Yeah, exactly. The spider mites, they only feed on the foliage, so you don't really have to worry about them in that way. It's true that, I suppose, like technically, they do get around. They can catch wind and that sort of a thing, and that's one way that they get it. They can move somewhat short distances, and also longer distances. I made some videos that kind of go over those dynamics. But to be honest, I feel like, in my experience, if you treat them at the foliage level, you're pretty much treating them completely in most cultivation settings. That's interesting

to think about, right? They're pretty organized. Yeah, they don't like to wonder if they are non nomadic

spider mice have been shown, if you can believe this. Like, just to nerd out a little bit, I just want to say that they've got one of the smallest genomes of any animal, and their brains are very small, like, more like a ganglion complex. It's, it's not almost too much to call it a brain.

You're being general. With safe, yeah. So being generous, when you call it a brain, a tiny brain, yeah, yeah, this tiny

brain lit and it's also distributed. It's not like a mammalian brain, like a lot of arthropods, but anyways, they can learn. They have behavioral learning in response to like, detection of bio controls, they change their behaviors. And females can also have these interesting effects, where they they like, lay silken threads with like pheromones, like tracked males and things like that. Like, they've got this very they actually have a very sophisticated, wow, uh, array of behaviors that don't get talked about a lot. I think that the sub lethal domain of like bio control use is slept on a little bit, but generally the most important things are, like the direct killing or direct like management effects. Anyways, so I understand why people don't maybe know about them as much.

That's cool, though, Manny, I we should do a spider mite revisit sometimes, because I do like talking about spider mites, classic, classic enemy in the garden. It's like the Joker to my Batman. So this goes along well with the next point, which is it's treating the wrong area. Often comes from not scouting the right area, right? How about not scouting at all? If the first big mistake is treating the wrong area when you find a problem, the second big mistake is not looking for a problem either. No scouting, improper scouting, incomplete scouting, things like that. So tell me about this, Matthew, like what you see people doing as far as just like skipping this when they shouldn't, and how we can scout effectively and

completely. It's kind of a security by obscurity mindset. I think so it can come about a bunch of different ways. I would never malign someone, because life gets in the way in a professional setting. You know, that is like a, I think that's a that's a professional import in a homegrown setting. I understand that, like, things can come up, and sometimes all you need is, like, a small vulnerability. It doesn't mean that you're, like, not good at what you do or anything like that. If you get pests, because they're very good at getting into plants. Let's just put it that way. And there, there are ways that we, yeah, we just might not have a way to defend against them, especially in, like, an outdoor setting. So the best thing that you can do is, I think, to, like, a week to week basis, really look at all of your plants as much as possible. You should be looking for problems. You should be looking at the foliage. Should be looking into the root zone. You should be checking because if you get some of these pests, like at a very early level, it's actually quite easy to get rid of them, or potentially, you have so so many more options, because you have this depth of time now. But if you wait, or if you don't detect something, it can become problem, almost like it'll be very low intensity for a little while, and then everything will ramp up at once. There's a lot of pests like this, especially pathogens, which you know sometimes you don't know that they're going to be there. You might get a new soil or new substrate, or something goes wrong with your water system, and suddenly a dynamic is rapidly different. And yeah, you had your damage control

at that point. Yeah, you'll see just that little bit of necrosis on the tip of a leaf, and you'll be like, is that nutrient burn? Is that? You know what I mean? And then you come back the next day, and it's just like black necrosis dominating the veins of every leaf as a pathogen destroys your plant and gets worse by the hour. That is a really good point. There's a couple things you you said there that I wanted. Drill down on looking at your plants, but not just staring at them from your human height point of view, turning those leaves over right, inspecting the undersides of leaves, getting the magnifying glasses or some sort of at least a loop so you can get in there close. Every time you scout, you should be doing that to random places. The other thing you said is get down in the root zone. That is the number one mistake that I see people making when they're scouting. It's something you and I talked about at length at Pesta palooza. But how many of you guys are getting down there pulling out a little root from the top, making sure it's healthy white, making sure it doesn't smell bad, making sure there's no aphids sitting on there suckling off of it. Scout the roots, right? Matthew, that's gotta be one of the biggest takeaways for today's episode. Scout those roots at least once a week. Like you said, yeah,

absolutely. So one of the things that I think, like at a large scale, especially you get to a point where, and I guess I'll define my terms, that, uh, large scale would be like, maybe over 100 plants, something where it's kind of hard to manage, maybe by one person. But rice ravens are so they're able to get to plants so quickly and easily that if you're not like, at least, if you can't get to every single plant, you should at least, like, be regularly scouting, like, every other pot, or, you know, looking for the damage, but

TSA checkpoint every fourth pot you're gonna randomly, you're gonna randomly select. You

have to do it, yeah, because it's, I understand that sometimes the cultivation team is lean, and if you're home grow, it's probably just you so that can become, you know, after a certain point, and then it's like you're trying to manage it. Hey, I understand that you're all about to overgrow, but some, you know, overgrow within reason.

That's the stinger. Overgrow within reason. Okay, yeah, that's a really good point, man. And you're right. Yeah, it's just me and my cat here. That's my team. So we've got a very short roster, and only one of us has opposable thumbs, so, you know, but

you do get like a plus five to like mouse, the anti Yeah, your types, you damage to mice, right?

Another firm and vermin, like enemies. Um, that's hilarious, dude, but that is a problem I see, man, people not getting in there and checking those roots give them a good smell, like I said, use all of your senses here, right, other than taste. I guess you're not really, but you want to, you want to feel those roots, make sure they're not slimy, and see them and make sure they're not, you know, all brown and dark. You want to smell and make sure that it doesn't smell funky. And you want to listen. You want to listen closely for the buzzing of rice root aphids, because hopefully you don't hear that. Grow cast membership. If you love this show, you will absolutely love grow cast membership. Find it at growcast podcast.com just click on membership. It'll bring you right there. And there are so many perks to joining membership. Today I'm going to talk about one of them, the members only discounts. Now these discounts are secret discount codes that only are available to members of the growcast community, and they're going to save you your entire membership feedback and then some not only do you save $20 per pack on growcast seed code genetics, but you also get 20% off hlG lighting, that's right. 20% off of their website with the secret code, you get 35% off SD microbe works.com Okay, now we have regular codes for those code. Growcast works at both those sites, but that's only gonna get you the smaller discount. Join grow cast membership, and you'll get the deeper discounts on these products, plus more like Rimrock, analytical sex testing, rain science, grow bags, Bucha, earthworks, OK, callax, microbes. You can find these member discounts only in our Patreon, and it's just one of the many, many benefits of the Grow cast membership program. You also get hundreds of hours of bonus content, resources, members only videos. And the best part, everyone always tells me, access to the amazing grow cast community, where we uplift each other as gardeners. We don't tear each other down, we help each other succeed in our gardens. And best of all, you can find people in your local chapter and go to meetups, and it's so much fun. I can't wait to see you in there. It's growcast podcast.com/membership, that'll bring you right there, and I'll see you on the inside. Take advantage of those member discounts, everybody. We're adding more all the time. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, huge shout out and special. Thank you to all you amazing members. See you there, everybody. So let's see here. Moving on to the the third major problem that I see. This is one you brought up that is so true, man. So let's say we're even on point with the scouting, along with the idea of not treating the right area. I see a lot of people treating one time like sometimes waiting until they see a problem. So nope, no. IPM prevention. And and then when they see a bug, they do one application and they think it's going to do the job. Is that ever the case? Matthew, I mean, I'm sure sometimes you can knock stuff out with one application, but, like, that's not something you recommend, right? You got to follow up strong when you see a problem, exactly.

It's why you you would just constantly be crop scouting, essentially, because you should always be looking for the problem potentially, because it's not necessarily a matter of, again, it's not against anyone. It's not, it doesn't. I'm not talking down on anyone's skill level. I have seen some arguments towards this, but you know, people get past even people who are very competent and capable. It doesn't make anyone a bad grower, but it does happen sometimes. So you just got to be aware that it could happen. You get some sort of pesky you are intending for it to be there. And then, when you apply something as a treatment, if you get it early enough, you apply. And then you come back and see, hey, did it work? And then keep looking, because if you find that you know you had this rest problem, or you had a powdery problem. You see, you think you got everything with the bio control, with some microbial bio pesticide or something, but maybe you didn't see that the spores, which in like gulavinus, secret serum, which is found in cannabis, another crop, has been shown that it's basically invisible for the first like, 128 hours or something. I remember, right? So you're not going to see it visually. It could be back already, exactly. So don't just apply the one hot spot. Apply to the rest of the place. If you get spider mites, don't just apply for sim list to that plant, like, take a good 30% chunk and then equalize it across your the rest of your plants, or something like this. Make sure the distribution maybe is biased towards the hot spot, but don't forget or neglect other areas.

Yeah. And like you said, following up generally, I would like to hear from from you audience. Our email is contact at growcast podcast.com send me all your pest stories. You know, the ones that you just couldn't get rid of, the ones that you battled, or the ones that were stupid easy to get rid of. You know, it seems like every infestation is unique, but generally, you see even these pest control products recommending, you know, spray three days in a row, like follow up with a show of force. Your preventative practice can be like, once a week. That's fine. I'd say, you know, I'd like to see maybe two times a week with a gentle IPM spray. Once a week is fine, but once you see something, you got to hit him with a one, two, maybe three punch combo, and then be very, very vigilant and ready to follow up at an increased rate for a while, because that's usually what I see it takes to knock out an established mite infestation or to knock out an established thrip infestation. Very rarely do I see a grower just walk in there, blast the plants with one thing and then be done with the problem. So just something to consider, the power at which you follow up when you see a problem, you should be hitting them hard and you should be spraying before you see a problem, so gotta get that prevention in there. How do you remember to I mean, is it just part of your schedule and calendar? How often would you preventatively spray your garden? Matthew, and is there any schedule to it, like, do you foliar on Fridays, or is it, you know, might Monday? How does that work? You

know, I've I actually, I personally don't always recommend to kind of spray constantly, but mainly, but it's only for like, economic reasons, sure, but I think that, see, this is why pest history is so important. So in a vacuum, I wouldn't necessarily always say that's the case. However, a great example of where it is is, like outdoor and like bud worm, for example, having things like pheromone traps or corn your worm to know, okay, there's a bunch of male mods, like around late summer, I should start applying my bio controls, and you can severely reduce bud worm problem, and in a way that if you were only reactive, that would just not be acceptable. Probably,

yeah, absolutely. And like you said, there's so much more nuance when you're like outside, when you're at scale, these things become very nuanced, and people like you get creative with the with the solution. So we're not just constantly applying the same spray over and over, making pests resistant to something or something right like that, all depends on the on the product you're using. So those are the first three big mistakes we want you avoiding. Treating the wrong areas, not scouting or scouting improperly. And then, when you see a problem, not following up hard enough, only spraying once you see a problem, or not spraying at all until you see a problem. And when I say spraying, really, I mean just implementing your IPM plan. And a lot of the IPM plan, Matthew comes from our next point, which is knowing what you're probably going to be up against. This is one of the more interesting ones that I thought that you were really smart to come up with here, because, like, you should know what's in your area, what. Common to your geographical location and what you might be facing that might help you out a lot when it comes to crafting your IPM plan. Can you talk about like, knowing what's in your area and how someone might go about learning what's in their area?

This is one of the reasons why what you said is actually very valid, because if you have the pest history, then you know, like, for example, in some cases, not everyone's cases like this, but I've had many, I have many situations where, like, a certain pest would become, maybe not only in this area, in this time period. And this is not necessarily just outdoor, but like indoor, because the external influences the internal right? So if there's good, if there's a lot of Western flower thrifts, you know, buzzing around, then even if you're indoor, the chances of them getting in is greater because there's more of them around, right? So you might get them in the summertime. And so if you know that that's the case, you might apply for similar mites beforehand, knowing that, like clockwork, week 32 or week 35 or week 25 or maybe you have, like, yellow sticky cards or blue traps, and you use those to see, you know, maybe I'm not in here all the time, or maybe because, like, I don't know, you put them around your property, and you might even find things that you haven't that you don't get yet. So it's like, Oh, I get white fly, you know, in the winter months because I live next to a poinsettia farm or something, which does happen. So knowing that you're near an agricultural location too, or knowing that you're near, like a national park or something like that, those are also really helpful, even if you're an indoor setting.

Yeah, that's, you know, one thing that you opened my eyes to in Pesta Palooza was the Western flower thrip, basically the the map that they cover, if you made like a US map, with all the different borders of these pests domains, whose Empire would be the biggest. You know what I'm saying? I know that's a hard question, but like, it seems like thrips and mites are kind of everywhere, whereas a lot of the other ones may be relegated to the coasts where it's more humid, or things like that. You know what I'm saying? Like, it seems like thrips are everywhere across the country. I don't know, though, you tell me, I think

you're right, you know, and, and if you have the, if you have this, like, great amount of reference for other agricultural crops where cannabis shares the past, like Western flower, thrips, two spots. Spider mite is a big one. COVID year one was a massive one. Even rice root, if it was well known in like rice or wheat or things like this barley for a long time. And so we do have some information about where they might be active. Like maybe if you live in the Corn Belt of the United States of America, you might be more liable to get on

your worm, maybe. And we grow it everywhere. We grow a lot of corn, especially in the Midwest, exactly.

But so like Western flower thrips and two spots, spider mites are super ubiquitous. Uh, two spots. Spider mite is maybe the most prolific herbivore of all animals, not just arthropods. And like I think some some estimates are like 4000 different species of plants, tons of different families, disparate. They are the herbivore King, perhaps, or maybe I should say queen. They're Haplo diploid, and I think the females are most important. But for Western flower, thrips, you know, there are some populations people don't know this, but there are some populations that are that they don't need, that they essentially reproduce like aphids. So only certain strains are like this, though, which is kind of fascinating, and a lot of them are resistant to certain chemicals and pesticides. Nothing you would use in cannabis, right? But that's still going to have cross resistance with other things, potentially natural products. Man,

yeah, so, so back to what you were saying. What agricultural crops are in your area? What are some common pests that people deal with in their vegetable gardens. Do those pests cross over easily to cannabis? Like you said, spider mites will eat just about anything like that is their superpower. They take eat your vegetables to the nth degree. They will eat any vegetable. They'll hop right from one to another. Thrips is another good example of that. Whereas you enlightened me that aphids, for instance, generally, are not I freaked out when I saw canopy aphids on my jalapeno peppers, thinking they would hop over to my cannabis plants. But you say that's generally not the case. It's important to know that stuff.

Yeah, it could help you not stress out, or maybe make an application that you don't want to do. Maybe you've heard horror stories from other people online, even for myself, you know, I don't try to be an alarmist, but it can be pretty it can be pretty deleterious. People lose crops and like, that's, it's game over, and that's very sad. And I feel very, very bad whenever that happens, especially if I feel like people could have, like, you know, helped the situation by influencing a little bit of prevention, right, a little bit of. Cost for that. Yeah, and aphids are, like you say, generally specialist. Some of them are generalists, and you have to account for that. But in cannabis, you know, we only have a couple that are really major right now. Maybe that'll change in the future, but for now, don't worry about it too much. Maybe,

yeah, and some of them may surprise you, like I was even told that powdery mildew is a specialist, right? The powdery mildew on one species won't necessarily hop to another species. That one blew my mind too. I wouldn't have expected that.

Yeah, it's incredible how a lot of species in the powdery mildew group are pretty specialized, and that's why I try to make my videos the way they do with all these references, so that people know this, and they know that, like the dandelion outside isn't necessarily a vector, but what we really need is research that will show, well, which ones are, and we have a little bit of that information, but I suspect there's more to be discovered, and different strains of the species might become specialized on cannabis. We've seen this in other plants, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's already in the process of happening and as cultivation increases. You know, it's just another thing to think that things are constantly changing, and we should look to what happens in other crops to see what might happen in cannabis.

Yeah, absolutely, man, we're gonna, I swear to God, we're gonna breed a super cannabis aphid one of these days. That's gonna be the like scare headlines of 2029 it's gonna be the new super cannabis pests. It's coming, folks, it's gonna be like Mothra. Okay, so knowing what's in your area, and then knowing about those pests, like you said, are they generalists? Are they specialists? These are things that can hugely influence and help strengthen your IPM plan. So those are four big mistakes. I mean, listen, we could go on and on and on. This last one I feel is, is a really good one, though, when we talk about spray applications, most home tent growers, IPM protocol revolves around their spray, like there are some people doing preventative beneficial insects and poly cropping and things like that. But most of the time, people are using a spray, whether it's like super gentle and natural enzyme style spray or horticultural oils or whatever they're using, they're generally using a spray. And when you're using those products, I think there's a lot of mistakes made when it comes to the choice of these products, and the order in which these you use these products, and how you might mix these products. Sometimes people pay twice for the same thing. Knowing if your product is an oil based product is helpful because you don't want to spend money. Spend money on another oil based product, because you're a paying for the same thing and then B using something that you probably shouldn't be using that often in oils, don't want to use it too too much, because horticultural oils can can slow down the growth of the plant, clog the stomata, as people have pointed out on this show. So talk to me about the biggest mistakes when you're buying sprays, and then also when you're mixing sprays, the fact that you might mix two that would render one incompatible.

One really good example, I think, is actually, is actually very similar to rotating different chemistries, even if they're natural chemistries. But it's also with using certain bio controls. For example, if you want to use microbial bio pesticides for powdery mildew, there are actually multiple species and even strains of different species that are available to use. And so you might consider having, you know, a multi domain consortium, rather than applying just a singular one. People think that bio controls can't be resisted to, or it's a common mantra, or something to that effect. But this kind of selection can happen very quickly, potentially, especially like microbes, right? Like fungi, come on, fungi are very adaptive and powdery. Mildew has had to do that this across Earth for like, hundreds of millions of years. Like, give it a little bit of credit. Alternatively, if you want to use, like a like a potassium bicarbonate or similar sort of product, or an oxidating product, like, obviously, that might have negative effects. And there you might affect one microbe that is using antimicrobial compounds, and maybe it doesn't affect one that is more of a parasite, right? So also combining those, those different kinds of actions, if you maybe apply one first and then apply the microbes afterwards. You know that might be the most shrewd approach, yeah,

and where you're not shooting yourself in the foot, right? I think that's a great way to start the conversation. Of, is this spray going to mix poorly with something else, which is the. First question should be, is this a living bio control? These are generally fungi, like you said, these are generally bacteria that are designed to ward off or kill or somehow inhibit a pest. If it is one of those things, a living organism like fungi and bacteria probably not going to play well with a lot of the other non biological ones. For instance, a dissolving enzyme product like Dr zymes, a product I love, not something that you want to recommend mixing with your bacteria, because those enzymes are probably going to rip apart a lot of those bacteria and render render them useless, right? Like you said, on the flip side, if they are two living products, they might play really well together and be way more efficacious than if you did space them apart. So that's the other side of this coin, which is sometimes you do want to mix things. And I would say, like you said, particularly mixing biological controls, because we know that diversity is always good, and I'm sure that there's some cases where some biology might interfere with another, but I'd imagine that largely they'd play well together. That's just what I imagine. So knowing what you're spraying and what you're mixing, and don't mix those two ones together, even things like horticultural oil, Matthew, that can't be good. I know you're not a molecular biologist or whatever, but mixing horticultural oils with your biological input, that can't be good for the microbes in there. I couldn't imagine.

Sometimes I feel like there are examples where this is not the case. But yeah, in a lot of cases, yeah, I would say so. I would say that at least it can be quite disruptive. The other thing is that, like you very well, pointed out some of these oils and other substances too. They can maybe have some sort of disruptive effect on, like you mentioned, the clock stomata. There's also factors like there's cutin, there's a waxy cuticle on a lot of plants and cannabis, this is also the case too, and so you might wear that down or completely remove it, which might have helped in the resistance of, like the spores of, say, powdery mildew, for example. Wow, interesting. Yeah. So you can actually come to a situation where you're having a detrimental effect, or which you really are doing, are inheriting the vulnerability, or at least the cost of the vulnerability while making a pretty strong, like offensive push. And so maybe that makes sense for you. In other cases, maybe it's not very helpful, especially if you can't keep it up and the cuticle takes a long time to recover. And maybe it's like the middle of autumn and now you have powdery mildew worse than you normally would.

Wow. That is fascinating, man. And you know what I have seen plants that have that extra little sheen to them? It must be a plant that has a robust cuticle, as you say. But you ever seen those plants? You feed it real well, and it's got this, like strong, resilient kind of waxy coating to the to the fan leaf surface, particularly, is what I'm thinking of, kind of what you're talking about. And you're right. You don't want to wear that down. That's a natural defense that's developed over hundreds of millions of years. Really cool. So let's go over this here. Let's recap for the listener, the top five that we could come up with, okay, and there are more, okay. We could do a part two to this easily, what we want you taking away as mistakes to avoid in your IPM protocol. Don't treat the wrong areas right. Know the difference between your root zone and your canopy, how to treat your entire space and incorporate that into your IPM schedule. Make sure that your IPM schedule includes scouting, no scouting, or improper Scouting is going to absolutely come back to bite you in the butt. Another problem is only spraying once when you see a problem, and or not spraying at all when you don't have a problem, right? Getting that spray schedule on point, and then when you see a problem, doing a full blown attack and make sure that you're responding hard enough, also knowing what's in your area, knowing the pests that are going to threaten you, whether they're specialists or generalists, the more knowledge you have of your enemy, the better, easier time you're gonna have taking them down. And then finally, making sure that you're mixing sprays properly. Don't mix ones that are incompatible, specifically biologicals with things that might harm biologicals. And then do mix things that are compatible, specifically biologicals with one another, or other examples, like, you know, enzymes and a little drop of soap and things like that. If you guys have questions, if you have stories, contact at growcast podcast.com, of course, and then I'm in the membership discord every day. So let me know what you thought of this episode. Matthew, this was great stuff. I'm still thinking about Pesta palooza. We got one later this year in Virginia. We might pop one off in Illinois. It all depends. So thank you for being an awesome educator. I hope we can do a pest to Palooza in in Virginia or Florida or Illinois, super soon. Man, I'm looking forward to

that. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that, too. And I really enjoyed this episode. Allow me to flesh out verbally some of the concepts I've been working on, like for my book. So I feel like I was more success. Think this time around, or more detailed at least. So I appreciate it. Yeah,

man, good stuff every time, and we can go on about this, right? Well, maybe we'll do another top five list soon, and kind of put these in different formats. You let me know what you think. Listener, I know you enjoyed listening to me and Matthew, Matthew, where can people find you? Talk about your products, your your plugs, your Patreon, all your stuff. Thanks,

Jordan for professional inquiries. You can find me@sentinel.com you can also find a lot of free information about pests and Plant Health and all the sort of things I talk about in presentations@youtube.com slash Sentinel. And then you can also find me at patreon.com/sentinel,

that's all for now. See everything we're doing at growcast podcast.com, you know the drill. Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody. That's all for today. Matthew gates, Jordan River, signing off. Be safe, grow smart. That's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate all of you remember go to grow cast podcast.com/list, the green list is coming back. That's right, and we're launching with a special little coupon code offer. You're going to want to be subscribed, especially if you are a member, but get on there, because I have a bunch of good stuff heading down the pipe with the green list. So that's our email list, and it's back on. And if you're not on it, go and join now. You're not going to want to miss out on some of the big giveaways that we'll be drawing from the green list. Grow cast podcast.com/list get on that list. It's free. Just give us your email, and we will give you all sorts of bonus content and some huge giveaways coming. Like I said, grow cast podcast.com for all the stuff, seeds, membership, all the fun stuff, I hope to see you guys in membership. We're having so much fun there. Every single day we deliver so much content. I'm loving it, everybody. What can I say? Stay tuned. I will be headed back to the mainland in April. We've got our cultivators cup. Got a couple classes coming up, couple meet ups coming up. Not as busy of a schedule this year. I'm focusing more on some digital offerings, but we do have some fun stuff. So stay tuned. And like I said, get on that list. Grow cast, podcast.com/list, I'll see you there. Everybody be safe out there. Bye, bye. Now is it

more valuable to get the reward the risk is worth it? Yeah, that doesn't always pan out. Yeah.