Things seem to be going really slow i dont know whats causing it looks to be healthy my temps got a little high so i tried to manage that i got it down to 80 finnally watering every 2 days there have been some gnats about sprayed my neem oil and and seems to be manageing them well will wait and see how it goes
So i have a decision to make and i cant decide i can keep at the infestation with neem oil hoping it clears up but im not holding my breath or the alt decision a peroxide soil dredge almost assuring eradication but also killing all my benificial baceria and microbes
What to do
Hi mate, if it were me I'd be going with H2O2. Kill them and rebuild benificials. Let the soil dry out quite a lot. Get some sticky traps and a pot of cider vinegar.
Okay so gnats you say?
Firstly, they usually result from too humid (consistently) conditions. So you should consider that.
Problem is obviously in the soil...
Sticky tape by the soil (and like around the trunk, btw) helps.
I'd also recommend like, cloves and cinnamon powder, maybe even some DE with that (as it will help dry the surface). Depending on if you have some of that stuff
Iirc there was also potentially some other bait stuff you could use (but I forgot what it was, something simple).
So the sticky tape to minimize the fuckers crawling up the plant.
The cinnamon/cloves to kinda make them fuck out.
The DE to keep the surface more dry (and potentially also fuck up larvae).
And baiting with like whatever it was (may have been something basic like vinegar and sugar, I don't remember).
But hey, before that, hopefully the neem oil works (I've never tried it).
*Edit:
Oh I checked, you say the neem and pyrethrin mostly fucked them up, good to hear, but I'll leave the comment as is. Though I have to add, pyrethrin isn't non-toxic...just fairly low toxicity to humans, dogs (typically). To cats, aquatic animals it is super toxic, of course, also super toxic to a bunch of beneficial microbes and insects.
@Strainrescue,
Yeah first grow I had bad gnat problems (outdoor, very wet), all I had was sticky tape and DE, and it helped to curb that problem to the point they pretty much just fucked off. Though they did persist for a while, and it's mostly because the soil was too moist/wet, consistently. The gnats themselves didn't actually cause many problems though freaked out coz I was inexperienced and unsure, but of course, very annoying to find them in flowers and they can promote mildew/fungus shit.
Have only had the occasional gnat (not like infestations) since then, but I've been using all kinds of weird experimental shit (not like buying pesticides and crap, just flower, leaf teas, ferments, etc) and generally the soil wasn't as watered. If I see gnats now, I know it's either been raining too much or I overwatered. That simple.
Outdoors, caterpillars in summer and aphids in winter are the two consistent pests I get. The aphids I'm almost sure because it's cool and dark, nitrogen excesses (vs phosphorus, potassium, etc, coz nutrient uptake is a bitch in winter). Like the environment self-regulates, coz the plant has too much nitro, aphids magically spawn. And I can't do shit about the caterpillars, like if you grow 10ft+ plants, have shitloads of moths, you're gonna have caterpillars and they'll fuck some shit up, but I've learned to kinda deal with it. Coz I mean, with plants those size, a bit of damage here and there isn't going to bother me.
And I've seen time and again, that using intervention shit like BT (massively overused, people have NO CLUE of the damage it causes) to "kill things" is a fucking terrible idea with worse results. And those results are often non-obvious.
Like for indoor grows, much of that shit isn't a concern, but outdoor you gotta respect the environment. Coz it bites back.
@sir_isO, thank you for the checking into the problem so much the pyrethrin was an interesting thought process on my part after seeing 1000s of the little bastards living it up in the freshly watered plant i hit em with what i had on hand i know its toxic to fish mildly toxic to humans and dogs usually results in burning itching skin after long exposure to sensitive tissues like face and the top of the hands but i knew it killed on contact was an oil similar to neem so luckily i didnt hit them with it to hard but i did hit it with the neem pretty heavy and almost a week later it looks like i nuked em but i was worried about about what it did to my soil checked my ec and was 1800 so it seems to have resolved itself i just need to let it dry out for a while make sure they stay dead than flush (i use dry organic amendments and they just got an amendment at 4 weeks of flower ) that will release enough nutes to finish out