Clean stock is two jobs, not one. Lab testing every mother for hop latent viroid handles the thing you cannot see. This page is the other half of it: what happens every week so that pests never get established in the building in the first place.
Every room is sprayed on a weekly schedule. The two products in the rotation are Lost Coast Plant Therapy and Athena IPM. Both are insecticide, miticide and fungicide in one, and both are made to be used through the whole cycle rather than held back for emergencies.
The point of a fixed weekly cadence is that it does not wait on somebody noticing a problem. Spider mites, thrips, aphids and powdery mildew are all far cheaper to keep out than to clear out, and a mother block that gets away from you is not a bad week. It is a season, and every cutting taken off it in the meantime.
The building is fogged weekly, not just the plants. Spraying treats foliage. Fogging reaches the room — benches, walls, corners, and the air between the plants. Anything sitting on a surface waiting for the next crop gets treated with everything else.
A nursery is not a grow. We are not taking one crop to harvest and then stripping the room down between runs. Mothers stay, cuttings come off them constantly, and the same plants are in the building for a long time. That is exactly the situation where a pest population, once it gets a foothold, has nothing to interrupt it.
So the programme runs to a calendar, not to symptoms. Weekly, every week, whether or not anyone has seen anything.
We are not telling you that live plants ship sterile, because no nursery can honestly tell you that and you should be suspicious of any that does. What we are telling you is that the building your cutting came out of is on a scheduled programme rather than a reactive one, and that the schedule does not slip.
Quarantine anything new for a couple of weeks before it touches your mothers — including cuttings from us. That is not us hedging. It is what we would do, and what we would tell a friend to do, with plants from anyone.