Early rain in NorCal makes Bud Mold How do I stop it?

[Lusi]

Hi folks,

As many know, Northern CA has been hot with unseasonalbly. Old temps and rain. A HUGE storm with several inches of rain will strike again Tomorrow. I didn't get my plants covered in time before yesterday's showers and only have managed to get one garden covered inn the short break today before the pain sent me back to bed.

While covering the large garden, I found Bud Mold on two of my GrandDaddy Purple plants. Thirds plants have the densest buds, but there's no way this mold is from the rain as it was too far along when I found it today. I see signs that the rest of the buds for this strain are in mild limbo with the white pistils turning mushy brown and the dead leaves soggy.

Besides cover them, what else can I do? They are in full bloom and no where near finished. Is there a way to prevent the mold on the still healthy buds? Is there something to spray or would thinning the fan leaves or smaller buds off the plants help? I fear to lose my entire summer crop! What are other outdoor growers doing?

I have pics, but must locate a working computer before I can upload them. iPads suck for this.

I have achieved thick sense buds that folks seem to prefer, but my old air buds never got soggy moldy.

While imwork on photos, any advice from all you pros would be greatly appreciated! We'll get 3 inches of rain and drop to the 40 s the next 2 nights. :-(((((

 

[Lusi]

Photos of moldy buds

Wow, the Ipad auto spell check sure butchered that post... Here are the photos I have I need new ones of the plants the mold hit.

All this can't be from one day of light rain, can it?? I got the plastic up before the big storm hits tonight, but even the dead leaves that normally crumble in my fingers are soggy and damp. It's been in the 90s every day until two days ago. Now the high is 60. What to others in Northern CA do?

Here's one of the buds with mold hidden inside what looked to be healthy:

Here are two buds that have the pistils going brown, and slimy. I cut a few of these buds open and now realize this is what it looks like before getting inside the bud. See the first bud had some mold inside. Can I stop it somehow at this point? Neem?

Here is my attempt to cover my screen house in plastic. The screens were great! The only critter that found my plants here were mites. My other smaller garden has betting, but I spray BT for caterpillars as the screens had holes. That garden is designer plants with dense buds and likely a 100% loss to mold.

Here is the happy healthy Shiva Shanty II from Sensi Seeds. Nothing kills this these plants in my three times growing this strain.

This monster plant is over 9 feet high! It started out life as a clone taken in bloom back in March. I was going to toss it out, but it started reveg in April and was trying to live. In May, it was about a foot high and I set it outside along with a few others. By June when I was moving to a new house, this plant and all the others went into full bloom?!?! It was in a pot as I moved and still in Bloom in late July when I put it in the ground inside this cage. I spend all of August cutting the blooms and leaves full of sticky trichs off of all my plants. By late Aug, I see new growth. In Sept, the plants are back in bloom, but this stubborn strain continues to grow up and out! Now all other strains are covered with thick buds and getting mold. Shiva Shanti still has buds forming and healthy white pistils nowhere close to finished while the other strains slow down. Too bad I HATE the smell and taste of this strain and made the last batch into cookies. LOL It's potent, just too pine-citrus in taste. Yuck

 

[Lusi]

Guess no one else is growing outside... All the tips for controlling this indoors seem impossible outside! I'll try sticking it in the pest section.

 

[Lusi]

What I came up with for Botrytis and did about it

Well, since this is here and no one replied but me, I might as well share more pics of bud mold, botrytis. Luckily all moldy buds but one are on the granddaddy purple plants. This strain is destined for hash and nothing specia as it does nothing for me. These are few photos out there of this in early stages, where the mold is still deep inside the bud. Check back for more pics later.

I'm finding these buds easy to spot and smell, needing no scope to be sure. The infected buds and leaves just pull right off with a gentle tug. Here's my own steps to deal with it, outdoors:

1). COVER PLANTS BEFORE RAIN It only took one day of light showers to do this to my plants! Gardeners.com has double metal hoops that make row covers 3-4 ft hight and 3 feet wide. 3 hoops under $30. I have made these into roof supports for insect screens and simply tossed plastic over them. Tying them to $8 tree stakes can easily give me a 5x7 foot canopy. The pics above show a dog cage with these same hoops for the roof. The weight of the rain twisted these too much to last. 8 feet wide was too much for them to go. I'll ad pics of the second garden. I won't see rain for another week or two and all should be harvested bit 3 sativas. ) if not for covering my plants before the second storm, I'm sure the loss would be huge! I included another easy idea below.

2) STERILIZE I sterilized all snippers and made a spray of rubbing alcohol and water which I used on my bare hands supplies each time I handled a bud. I chose not to use rubber gloves since the warmth of my hands evaporates the spray a bit faster. I brought towels and wiped the spray off everything in contact with the plant each time, including scopes and snipper handles.

3) SIMPLE FUNGICIDE I also made a spray mix of 9 parts water to 1part milk. I read this is a fungicide because it changes the ph which kills mold spores. It didn't harm anything at least... I haven't looked in the scope as I spray, but the person who wrote the article I found did. I'll check later. I hit every moldy bud before I cut it and after, plus the top of the decapitated colas. All the ruined buds, I tossed in a plastic bag, then put in the garbage disposal, just in case. My compost heap would have spread spores when the buds dried up.

4) PREVENT SPREADING It took me hours to look at every single bud on each plant and spray between handling them. Only 4 of the infected buds showed dead spots on the outside. None had visible mold until I cracked them open. It was the curl of the leaves and smell that pointed me to the buds that were infected. Get it EARLY!! Today, I only found two more. The total was around 20 rotten buds. Be sure to cut at least an inch off each bud past the mold. I took more and anything touching the bud was sprayed with the milk mix. If it works, i'll know in a few days.

5) CATERPILLARS = BUD ROT Since my plants are all screened from moths and butterflies, only one of my moldy buds was due to boring caterpillars. When you cut the bud back to the rotten stem, you may find a tiny 1/4" caterpillar, or just a hole where it bored into your bud. If you don't have screens, start hitting plants with BT from the day they go out. Corn borers are a huge problem if you have corn fields near by. Cabbage loopers are the ones eating the leaves, especially if you have veggies. Any flower or tree that attracts birds and butterflies will be covered in caterpillars and so will your plants. Those white butterflies are just the worst... they lay one tiny egg on the bottom of each leaf. See my first posts from last summer for pics. You find where the caterpillars bored in by looking for bud mold.

6) CONTAIN AIRBORN SOORES Sterilize the hell out of everything and make sure air born mold spores are contained! If it's windy and your mold spots are damp and soggy, milk em down, put a plastic bag over it, then hack it off. Treat it like a male plant.

7) AIR CIRCULATION TO COMBAT HUMIDITY Buds don't have to wet wet to rot. Humidity is even worse than rain and dew is an issue. Thank heavens the climate hear is dry and sunny again. Sun on damp buds can make it even worse, so shade the damp plants and get air flow any way you can, after hunting down the mold. This rain was a month early or I'd have been better prepared. If my screen house was a flop, my plan was to buy a roll of livestock fencing and make cages around each plant, then cover. Just take the cage off as soon as the rain stops or the plastic traps the humidity and makes things worse. My screen house with plastic tarp was open on two of the sides to let air in. The small garden was covered with a blue tar which I tied to tree stakes and supported with metal frames. It was open on all 4 sides but it worked.

So, there's what I came up with after hours combing the internet. I didn't find squat for solution for OUTDOOR growers. In a room, humidity is easy to control even with a cheap dampit. If anyone has any further suggestions, plz post it! Surely there are other outdoor growers with mold!?? I can't find much on how late into bloom I can spray fungicides, or even neem. The SNS products are too expensive to use outside, just as these new mite sprays. Useless.

A friend down the road who used to grow outside and is a landscaper by trade has never even heard of bud mold. This is comforting to know it's rare in my climate and area. I swore he would cry when I he saw the buds go down the disposal after we looked at the hairy fibers under the scope. (the house smells funky) He wanted to take those buds home and dry them. Lol It's not worth the health risk and the potential to spread the spores about to salvage these buds. I'm lucky to have a enough extra plants to lose this much since only 30% of my plants were male this year. (hooray!) BTW, if your buds are already dry and have rot, wear a dust mask. Spores fly about, even when wet, and good ol Claritin is not enough to stop my nose from dripping like a faucet. Yuck!



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Well, I hope this post does someone else some good some day. If all this works, or not, I'll follow up. I'll get pics up later too. My poor old journal remains unfinished as i'm still repairing the new house and shoving boxes about. I hate leaving things undone, but the Internet and emails are getting ignored at least until the weather stops work outside. Sorry to everyone waiting for the end! The journal and product tests and reviews will get done eventually and the results are worth the wait! For me, one indoor and one outdoor grow a year are headache enough and will keep strains I like going. Outdoor plans for next season include a huge screen house for every plant not needing bees, including flowers and herbs. Screens made this easy and I only had to keep out ants and mites, that's it!! A few old carpet frames might be the key as is an insect barrier for crawlers, like a 6" wide moat of running water.

I found someone to make all my crazy inventions (most not pot related) and perhaps patent a few. When you are sick, simplifying things and making it so things can keep going even when you are out of it for a few weeks is important. Security, grow room construction and set up, pest prevention, water and irrigation are my focus for MJ right now. :-D I welcome any one's interesting ideas and am a detail junky. Pass em on!

Lusi

 

[HigherDrifter]

If you're having all these issues, many of which I am also experiencing, you might want to consider doing a water cure.

I'm in southern California. We just got rained on too - been cold and wet. If I hadn't decided on doing a water cure, my plant would still be growing right now, waiting to dry up for harvest and the conventional dry/cure.

I've had minor problems with budworms. Used BT to keep the damage down. I'm certain there are dead budwords in my buds cuz I'm seeing them in the cure water.

Lot's of other crap in my buds too - seeing it as well in the cure water.

Southern California air - isn't the cleanest air to breathe. With all the strong winds we've had around here, no doubts my buds are collecting all sorts of dirts, dust, smog and other toxic particulates, pollens, tree droppings, bird shit, insect shit...you name it. Probably getting smog and/or other toxic particulates from all over the globe dropped on southern California, and consquently stuck to my buds.

Water curing my buds almost makes perfect sense given the present environment. So I'll loose "bag appeal"...like I really give a shit about that. Going to loose some of the typical aromas and flavors...don't care all that much about that either. Since I use the drag-seep-inhale method (with emphasis on the seep - you know leaving the smoke in your mouth a while before inhaling) I'm certain that I'ma gonna taste quite a bit of something. Good chance the THC potency ratio will be higher with much of the water soluable compounds and matter leached out of the buds.

Just something to consider. Here' my water cure thread: HigherDrifter's Water Cure. There's lot's of other info on the internet about it. Might be worth looking into, even if you don't decide to go with a water cure.

 

[RaysDad]

I grow outdoors in Southern Cali. every other year. This happens to be my year off. I never have had any problems with bud mold"thank god". Those buds look pretty wasted to me but all things happen when it comes to growing pot. The Shiva plants look dynamite. At least you were blessed with some good stuff to carry you through to next season. SMILE and keep your emotions up there are always better day's ahead. Next year I hope you won't be moving and can take the time to watch your garden closer, the rain can kill a budding out crop almost overnight. See you in the spring!!! RD

 

[Lusi]

Hey guys Ty for the replies!

HD. You might be in Socal, but we have the same rainless climate with polluted air and all sorts of crap carried on the winds. Yesterday, I gave up and harvested everything in the photo except the Shiva Shanti and 4 smaller plants in another garden. I only found two more buds with mold, thank heavens! You nailed it, though my plants are screened from bugs, there is a LOT of dust dirt, per lite, small dead bugs and yuck. Disgusted, I rinsed off a few bad ones on a bucket of water and hung em up to see what happens.

Water curing sounds like a possibility, but I read different stuff saying to water cure fresh buds, or others dry buds. They've all been drying for 24 hours, but i'd be interested in trying this out on the duties ones, and the musty ones that I can't find mold on. Is it too late? So, you find dead caterpillars in your dry buds? Ack! I'm glad my mites were killed off before blooming, the thought of dead mites in them buds is gross. I didn't find a single dead caterpillar, not even on the bud I thought was done by one. My screens kept them out! I still used BT, but stopped after they bloomed, stopped all sprays, even foliar. I imagine it would taste funky. Lol (new at this)

I am a newbie with weed and find the taste and smell revolting. Maybe a few years down the road it will change, but now skunk and diesel are not appealing. BHO hash cookies has been the only taste free method so far, but I'm going for capsules this time with my dry ice hash. At least the hash removes dead bugs, but hair and fibers go through. Water hash sounds like a method I'd like to try out. Who cares what it looks like, lest taste is awesome! Your method of in haling.... Is this with smoke? With the vaporizers, I either breathe back into the volcano bag, or take half breathes of vapes and the rest air, then breathe out some, hold the rest and get more air, and keep it up until I see almost nom vapors coming out when I exhale. It also keeps me coughing down. I have not tried holding in my mouth. Makes sense! TY for the water cure link, I'll check it out!



RD, do you get all this crud collecting in your buds too? The bad part of no rain... The yellow plant next to the Shiva shanti has me stumped. It's a white skunk and the mother plant bloomed a lovely healthy purple at the end. This plant was all green two weeks ago, then overnight went yellow! Only one branch remained green and healthy. I thought, OK it,s outdoors this time and different. At least the yellow leaves are not back or wilted. The next day after this photo, the yellow leaves went limp and dead, all of them, overnight!?! There was no bud rot on this plant at all and one branch remains healthy. I have pics, but to fire up the computer again. When I scoped yesterday and decided to harvest, the trichs on this plant looked like they were melting. It was weird, and not past harvest time. The buds were still developing... I harvested it and trimmed off all the yellow leaves down to the pale green, then those too. All were limp. What the happened? This is a new thing for me.... The other plants were all normal, even the buds surrounding the rotted ones. The other plants were all cloudy to amber trichs, though even GDP and PK didn't turn purple outside.

I guess I should have put pics of the others up. The Shiva Shanti is supposedly 100% indica, lol, and is my healthiest. The White Skink yellow thing next to it by far the worst of the bunch. I cut all the rotted buds way back, sterilized, the hung everything in my tent to dry. If I missed a spot of mold anywhere, will it spread to drying buds? I have them all in my tent, no lights, but with fan and filter running full force. Is there a good humidity level to maintain in there to keep them from drying too slow or fast? I left all but the largest fan leaves on and removed everything dead or yellow. I can still pull out the two strains that had mold, if the put the rest in danger. Plz LMK!

I'm not looking for pretty buds and most of this will be made into hash. 1/2 gram hash is the least amount I use at once for pain! :-( I'll check out water curing for my dirty or moldy buds. Hope they didn't have to be fresh... Plz LMK if mold free buds from nearby moldy buds can make a moldy drying harvest. Man, I hope it's OK.

RD, Ty for the smiles. ) Next year, I hope to have a giant screened house with plants in the ground. No more moves for 7 years, at least. Phew! I'm not out of the woods yet. I expect to be robbed by the movers that were caught rummaging through my boxes of seeds (luckily all flowers in there) and wandering around the house to see the plants. The alarms are set, but all I can legally do is scare them off and not get shot. Next year, this will be a fortress only a fool would creep up on. Being disabled makes me an easy target! Even my indoor grow will be only to keep these strains alive until I test and decide what to keep. Next year, next year.... Finally my own house to do whatever I wish with! I don't worry too much about losing some of this crop. I have prescription mess and dispensaries to fill in the gaps.


Ack, 2am, no wonder my head hurts and I cant't think in fewer words! Gnight 4 now!

 

[Lusi]

HD... I started your water cure thread. It didn't say if the bud is fresh, green or dried. Mine are dried now, but I have a bit more to experiment with. KMK and I will try it/

 

[Lusi]

Plz help our veterans with PTSD, deadline is 25Oct!

I harvested all but 2 plants, as each day I found more moldy buds. It was too early and they all increase pain so far, but at least there was a harvest! That and the lady in my area that had her plants stolen in the night were enough to get me to bring mine in. I hope the last 2 remain mold free..... On to more important matters.If I get booted from my own thread, it was worth.

OK, I know this is off topic, but I will put it in as many threads i've started, as I can. We have 3 days left to get the last 800 signatures on the Whitehouse petition to allow medical Cannabis for all veterans with PTSD, not just the ones in med states. This is a safe and reliable source, you just need to set up an email and account and sign away, then pass it on. I've received no spam or crap from this. If you are a veteran and don't know of the VMCA or Michael Krawitz who is the man responsible for getting the VA to let vets in med states use MMJ and not lose benefits, then check this website out at the bottom.

Our troops need your help, whether you agree with the war or not. Many of these poor soldiers are disposable and being medically boarded out with no awareness that they have rights and there is help out there. Please, help them. We can't know what they see and relive each time they close their eyes, but we CAN help get them the only treatment that works, Medical Cannabis.

Thank you for your support!

Only 862 more signatures needed for Veterans medical marijuana petition.

Please assist Veterans For Medical Cannabis Access in reaching our
goal of 5000 signatures by 25 October. Time is quickly running out!

We already have 4,138 signatures and are only 862 short of our goal.

Once we have reached our goal this petition will automatically be sent
to the White House for an obligatory answer and we will be using this
to kick off a series of actions designed to bring negative attention to
the recent federal escalation against medical marijuana. Your help is
a significant piece of that puzzle. We need you to sign and get as
many others to sign as possible.

As the leader of Veterans For Medical Cannabis
Access [VMCA] I helped the VA create a medical marijuana policy that
respects the rights of disabled Veterans using this important
medicine per state
laws. That policy has been made to look like a cruel joke given the latest
actions of this presidential administration.

In response to the actions of the president our
organization has crafted a petition that we have placed on the new White House

"Allow United States Disabled Military Veterans access to medical marijuana."

The fact that a Veteran in New Mexico can use cannabis legally for PTSd but
a similar Veteran in Florida will not only face arrest by state
police for using
the same medicine but face punishment at the VA
hospital as well is wrong. It is illogical. It is not the practice
of medicine it
is the practice of politics on the wounded and it is shameful and it must end.

Michael Krawitz is a Disabled United States Air Force Sergeant
and Executive Director of Veterans For Medical Cannabis Access.

><><

Veterans For Medical Cannabis Access
3551 Flatwoods Road - Elliston, Virginia 24087 -- 540-365-2141 --
"Michael" <<mailto:miguet@infionline.net>miguet@infionline.n et>

 

[Rydale]

i feel you. i have the same problem.my sour puss strain is also infected. what to do? kentucky humidity is a bitch

 

[Conradino23]

First, cut out all the infected parts with scissors or a knife carefully. Then rub some alcohol where infection took place. Then I'd recommend spraying with lactobacillus acidophilus, which is a type of bacteria, but recently a very experienced grower advised using a hydrogen peroxide, and it's gonna be much easier for you to find it!

 

[Rydale]

Good man Conradino23 thanks for the help.I will follow your advise.