I won’t be using any kind of soap or pesticide to get rid of them. Part of why we grow our own stuff is so that we know it’s clean and safe.
Im going to employ an army of predatory mites to rid me of these thrips. I had hoped to use ladybugs, but they are not available in Canada at the moment. So my critters of choice will be Cucumeris and Hypoaspis.
Cucumeris has a voracious appetite for the young larvae stage of thrips. They can be applied directly to the foliage.
The Hypoaspis are a soil predatory mite. They will go after the young pupae in your grow medium. My current garden is a hydroponic DWC (individual buckets; no top-feed) using hydroton medium in baskets. I don’t know how these mites will do in this type of grow medium since it’s not “soil.” But the way I see it is, if the thrip pupae are growing and surviving in my grow medium, the good mites should be able to survive as well.
My order is is expected to arrive in 5 days. I’ll try to keep a close eye on my garden and update the progress. Maybe get some more pics and vids of the micro-war I created.
Cheers
YYC
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Thrips video
In case you are wondering what little thrips look like, check the link below for some videos of these pests I found on just one leaf.
I have no idea what zoom factor my Amazon microscope was at, but I couldn’t see these buggers with my bare eyes even once I knew exactly where in the leaf to look for them.
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