Damn Spider Mites!!!

flowerbug said:

i've never had to use that sort of solution as it seems the woodland hedge has supplied a balanced mite/predatory mite population. i have plenty of mites around in the gardens but they don't seem to be damaging anything.

Click to expand...

Lucky . Yeah, outside there's all those natural predators

catjac1975 said:

A systemic insecticide will work well, but I'm sure you can't use it on the bananas if you intend to eat them. I use it on a few flowering plants that I bring indoor every winter and it keeps all pests down.

Click to expand...

Bringing them in is always the trick. Every year I try to bring a few peppers in and it is tough. This year it was the corkscrew willow cuttings that did me in

i only have amaryllis for indoor plants and they are going dormant now. i put them outside for a while this summer hoping the fungus gnats that came along with the potting soil would go away. not yet, but a few more weeks of no watering should do them in.

when i brought them back in i didn't see any telltale webs and didn't find any mites on them but am very surprised because we have mites all over out there and i put the plants directly on the ground so there wasn't any barrier for them to cross.


do you have many plants inside?

if not too many see if you can find some forest floor detritus to innoculate your area. if you have a bad infestation it may help and probably won't hurt.

I don't know if you can still buy them and I never have but years ago I seem to remember people used Vapona strips for spider mites on house plants. Place the plant and strip inside a plastic bag, not sure for how long though, you'd have to do some research on it.

Annette

I am not a house plant person. I do bring in my citrus trees, before bring in I spray them down with garden hose for 2 days. I hopefully removed any pests

flowerbug said:

do you have many plants inside?

Click to expand...

Yeah, we have a few

flowerbug said:

see if you can find some forest floor detritus to innoculate your area. if you have a bad infestation it may help and probably won't hurt.

Click to expand...

I've never thought of that. Good idea.

I love how fast plants bounce back

usually garden pests are a sign of a system changing balance. things wobble sometimes. instead of using poisons to correct the balance i like to find what i can to help it go back to a functioning ecosystem. sometimes my answer is to do nothing at all because it will self-correct.

indoors i don't have the luxury of leaving things be as much as i'd like, but i do often leave the wispy house spiders alone. they don't bite and the big ones eat the little ones and catch some of the fungus gnats.

good luck with all the plants, hope you manage to get all the mean spider mites taken care of...