Very bad mite infection, now also leaves drop

I had a very bad mite infection. I identified it, and immediately after I applied neem oil solution on them. I used 1ml of neem oil / 1L of water, with a drop of dish wash to be able to dissolve the oil in water. I sprayed them 2 times in 10 days. Here is how they look now:



I use Advanced hydroponic line, with 1/3-1/4 strength suited for veg phase. RH is between 45-60% depending on the time of the day. Dehumidifier works when the veg room's 18h lights are on. They are under 400W Philips RetroWhite.

My question is whether its damage from the mite bites, or i drowned the leaves aswell with the neem oil? (I still guess i did not use too much of it.) Or is it by any chance a nute burn which I highly doubt again, because of the light strength of the nute soulution i use when watering. I water the girls every 3-4 days.

Air circulations is done by a 250m3/h fan for a 9m3 room.

This poor little fella looks like basil after all the torture with mites and the neem oil treatment. Its WL Skunk #1 2 months from seed under 200W CFL in veg room.



and some more leaf pics.



Any and all help is highly appreciated.

WBR

im sorry that sucks i know . i took foil covered the soil around the stems and diped my plants repeatedly in a large bucket of water until the bugs were gone . then used a light neem mix and they were gone . its all i can do to help

Did you spray your leaves when there was a lot of 'light time' left? looks like they could be spot burns on some of the plant leafs....

When I sprayed them I turned off the HPS and gave them just enough light so they think its daytime with 40W CFL, and only turned the HPS back on when they were dry after about 4-5 hrs. Nevertheless, there might have been some droplets of water on the end of the leaves, which may have caused these burns.

I'm thinking more and more like nute burn, despite of the light nute mix i used. So I'm gonna flush them, and use 1/5 strength nutes from now on.

The thing is there are 10 ladies in 3rd week of flowering, so they are gonna get their last treatment this tuesday, as i dont want to ruin the quality of my buds. In my veg box there are 4 more of them big girls which I can throw into flowering anytime, and the basil looking Skunk #1, and some others of the same size. Besides this I have some clones (like 15 of them, all different strains). So I was thinking maybe I throw everything into flower as fast as its possible, And treat the clones with dipping them into water every 2-3 days, and spraying them with neem every 5 days. The leftover mite infection looks the worse on the small ones, on the bigger ones its gone.

Do you think its possible to keep it contained on the small ones which can be submerged in water totally with very thorough spraying, or should I just nuke my whole garden?

WBR

Dont spider mites leave after the plant is cut? So grow em out and bubble bag em. that way your not losing your work!

grow is on edge of disaster. maybe start over, after a good cleaning. you ain't gonna get too much gear outta them.

The pics you see are the vegging ones. The 10 pcs in flowering will be done no matter what. There are only 6 weeks left till harvest, and they seem clean of mites. My problem is in my veg room, but I'm going to keep on spraying them until there is a reasonable amount of leaves left.

What I need to confirm is whether it's normal after neem oil treatment for leaves to drop like that, because of suffocation, or is it nute overdose.

For the leftover mites as I said, I'm going to dip them whenever necessary, and have 3-4 different types of anti-mites ready to keep them from developing resistance. BTW, did anyone notice resistance with neem-oil after a number of treatments?

As a last resort i have to nuke the veg room. It'll be decided in 1-2 weeks maximum, until then I keep fighting them as right now there is foliage left for them to continue growing. When it turns the other way around, I'll clean up everything.

WBR

I'm a big fan of natural predators. http://www.buglogical.com/

mites ussally dont cause leafs to fall off its the advanced nutes most likely . the neem oil idk maybe ? but i got rid of mites in 2 or 3 days from submerging them once a day and the eggs fell off too most of them and a little neem after to make sure im not too worried about them now . and btw my plants were well into budding it wont hurt the bud any either . i lost plants to those little monsters before so anything to help .

To me it looks like you went heavy on the neem oil. There's a product we use at my work called pure spray green I believe. it works excellent! when u spray are u using wet Betty? I haven't changed to the pure spray yet, I use wet Betty at 5 mls per gallon and azomax at the 15 mark on the bottle per gallon. Might be overdoing it but I ph my spray as well just to be safe. If you can make a habit to spray twice a week it should work just fine. I've seen more people come into work describing your same symptoms than I'd like to say using neem oil not that azomax won't do the same but I use it light and am able to repeat drenching. I noticed with wet Betty my kill rate increased exponentially once used with the azomax. It's coats even and stays on the plant better not to mention the plants love the foliar with the wet Betty. If there real bad I mean real bad u can take an air compressor and lightly blow the big ones off before u spray just to knock down the population before you spray. Obviously not at full blast so u don't rip leaves. Also preventive spraying periodically is way better than trying to fight a war of hungry mites.

in the future i would make a batch of earth worm castings tea and spray the plants the tea coats the leaves and the bugs dont like....

They look water logged. You need to transplant them into a bigger pot with fresh soil. Let them dry out almost completely between watering. Putting a bit of hydrogen peroxide in the water would help them too.

As for mites, get some forbid 4f on ebay and they will be gone for eternity.

Thank you all for the useful infos. Unfortunately most of the miticides cannot be bought here in Europe. I have some very strange stuff I got in my local grow-shop. Its oily and transparent, but at the moment it touches water it becames all milky white. Celaflor Naturen Schadlingsfre is the name in case anyone needs to look it up. Anyways, I'm stuck with it and neem oil, and it seems I successfully eliminated this mite infection, but I'll wait 1 more week to confirm it.
As I think most of these miticides which are supposedly organic, work in quite similar ways, I'll keep spraying them every 10 days in my veg room, so hopefully nothing will get out in my flower area.
Also I tripled up on disinfecting the corridor area to my growroom, and using a filter on my direct air intake aswell.
I keep humidity down under 40% so those little bastards will have a really bad time.

As for water logging I usually let them dry out quite well, but I will transplant those basil looking girls to a 7-8 liter pot, add some Canna Rhizotonic to strengthen roots and hope for the best. Nonetheless It's also possible those seeds are not of the best quality, as I sow some more of them and after 4 weeks from germination they are still with 3-4 nodes, so they are pretty small. It's another round of issues, so I'll open a new thread for them if i cannot get a fix on them in 2 weeks. Until then I transplant, go to 1/5 strength nutes with the bigger one, and spray every 10 day.

Again, thank you all for the very useful inputs.

WBR