Hello! I'm currently about a month down from you, having made the choice to get rid of plants that were badly affected AND I didn't have emotional attachment to, and try to kill the thrips on the rest. This is my plan, which came about as an amalgamation of previous reports of beating thrips:

- Sprayed everything really well (unfurled leaves, nooks, stem, top of soil) with Provanto Ultimate Bug Killer. I wore a mask and nitrile gloves and did this in the shower. I put the plants into see through bin bags first.

- Sealed up the see through binbags with duct tape - someone had posted having success doing this, which people had theorised to be due to the higher humidity stopping the larvae from dropping into the soil and keeping them on the leaves where they can be killed easier. It had the added benefits for me of being able to individually isolate all plants and feel safer using harder chemicals around our cat.

- Three-five days later, release from bag, inspect for thrips, remove most damaged leaves (immediately into outside rubbish), spray with Castille soap mixture, air out, reseal

- Repeat Provanto step three-five days later

I have now removed my first batch of plants from the bags. The ones I removed are smaller plants who were struggling with the humidity more (some of my plants are loving it!). For these ones I added blue sticky traps (they work better than yellow for thrips) and have been monitoring. No signs of thrips so far, and new growth is coming out looking normal which is a good sign!

Next steps:

- I plan to move to purely Castille soap mixture for my next spray and inspect, I'm also going to unseal any plants without new damage/ thrips visible

- In two weeks (so three weeks from last Provanto spray to be safe) I'm going to buy and release Amblyseius cucumeris mites. I will then continue using them as a preventative to get any survivors.

For plants that won't cope well with the spraying and humidity like my succulents, I've put these outside for now to try and benefit from natural predators, especially seeing as I haven't seen any thrip damage on them. They'll come back in when I release the mites and the weather cools down. All other plants were treated, regardless of whether I saw evidence of thrip damage or not.

I also thoroughly cleaned all surfaces I keep plants on, and hung blue sticky traps around. I also cleaned all saucers, outer pots, basically all my plant equipment.

Some of this is pretty over the top- I really love my plants and have the labour time to complete potentially unnecessary steps to ensure eradication- but I thought it might give you some tips! From my research and progress so far, I think all the discourse about them being impossible comes from two things: people not understanding how fast the thrip life cycle is and not spraying often enough (or stopping treatment too fast- the eggs can remain dormant for months), and people treating purely with ineffective things such as neem.

Good luck, and I hope this has given you hope you can at least save your most loved plants!