Cannabis chronicles #23, of plants and pests

Hello, and welcome to my cannabis page!

My 2 mature cannabis plants have been developing buds for a few weeks now. The Blue Dream started first, a few weeks ago, and the Cannatonic started budding within the last couple of weeks. The large leaves have been slowly getting yellow and starting to fall off the plants. Since this is my first time growing cannabis plants, I didn't know quite why this was happening. I had read that the plants do that as they develop their buds, so I wasn't too worried about it. A lot of the leaves were developing tiny spots as they started to get yellow, I didn't really know if this was normal or not.

I had posted a couple of my latest pictures in the Canna-Curate discord server, and @lethal saw the spots on the leaves and suggested that I check the plants for spider mites. That was something I had not thought of. The mites are so small that they're hard to see. I had not noticed any of the typical webbing that spider mites make, but I did find some at night with the flashlight.

Here's a few of pictures of the buds forming, and the damaged leaves.

Lethal suggested that I use a fish oil product called Organicide, but the local grow shop doesn't carry that, so I sprayed the plants with a neem oil solution. I'm going to need to spray them again soon, all I had was my squirt bottle to spray them with, and it's hard to get the underside of the leaves with that. I bought a pump up spray bottle with a nozzle that can be positioned to spray upward while I was at the grow shop, I just need to mix up a batch of neem oil spray in it and get the plants sprayed again.

It is also necessary to spray all the remaining tomato plants in the greenhouse because the annual whitefly infestation has returned, and I really don't need them moving to the cannabis plants. At this point, the whiteflies aren't very bad, and I sprayed the tomato plants with the squirt bottle when I sprayed the cannabis plants. That will slow them down until I can get the underside of the plants sprayed in the next day or 2. I didn't want to spray neem oil 2 days in a row, that's not very good for the plants, too much oil on the leaves.

Of course, now I have to wonder how the neem oil will affect the buds and their development. I guess I'll know soon enough. I know that neem oil degrades after a couple of days, so it's one of the more safe things to use on veggies, but I don't know how it effects cannabis plants. Nothing quite like learning this stuff the hard way...

That's all I have for this cannabis update, thanks for stopping by to check it out!