First let me pause a minute to take in the fact that I just typed, “Seed Starting Room”. Those are wonderful words. Also a fancy name for mechanical room but still, renaming it makes it seem exotic and extraordinary. Things have been going well since December. We have kept fungus gnats to a whisper by boiling water and using that to hydrate our potting soil and seed starting mixes. We only buy from inside the store which should help to keep bugs to a minimum while hurting the budget to the maximum. We have used mosquito pellets in the water and top water. Flowers were actually flowering, plants were luxurious and getting big, seed germination was high this year. Then on April 1st things took a turn.
I wish it was an April Fool’s Day joke but it wasn’t. I went down to do some more up potting and get some more seeds started. I noticed that some of the impatiens didn’t look happy and looking closer at them I saw the dreaded webs.
I thought it must be non plant threatening spiders because how would it be possible to have spider mites? Then again why have I been fighting white fly on the volunteer petunia? The white fly showed up out of nowhere and their population has exploded.
My despair was complete when I went down the following day and there were so many more mites, you could see them. I was ready to give up gardening. I have fought these pests before and I have never won. I thought we were about to watch all of our work, time, money, and dreams of gardens go up in webbing. What was a girl to do?
I did two things. The first was I started researching spider mites and the second I used the paper towel method and started around 300 peas. Do we have room for that many? Did we ever talk about that many when we were planning out the garden boxes oh so very carefully? We did not. Did I bother to check with Bill or look at the design to find out how many to start? I did not. Some depressions deserve full on crazy.
Because at some point we will all face these pests I want to share with you what I got from my research.
- Rinse the plants especially the undersides if possible. Don’t use a gentle trickle if you can hit them with a spray that has a little oomph without damaging the plant do that. You can rinse a lot of the adult mites off.
- Learn the life cycle of your enemy. Many times anything you do might reduce the population or kill the adults but nymphs’ or eggs won’t be killed. If you know how long each phase of their life goes, how long it lasts, and what will kill it then you can develop a plan of attack.
- Research the products you are going to use. How often you need to apply them. Do they kill on contact or need to be ingested? Do they affect blooms/pollen or just the leaves/stems? How long do they remain active? What insects do they work on?
- Have a rotation of products. If you use only a single product your enemy may develop a resistance to that product and you might only be dealing with one stage of their life. Say you use a product that kills adults on contact, what about the larvae/nymph or egg stage? Anything left behind will mature, reproduce and the cycle never ends. If you swap out with different products in a rotation you stand a high chance of hitting all the stages, no resistance being built up, and hopefully a complete end to your pest problem.
My first step was to hold all the plants (that I could) upside down in the sink and spray them with the hose wand. Stage 1 physical removal, it has a big impact removing a lot of the pest pressure immediately.
I then put all the worst plants on a cart and wheeled it outside. The temps are not super hot in fact sometimes it’s chilly. Plus we have had a lot of rain and when it warms up even a little bit it gets muggy/humid. Both of those things are conditions that mites don’t like. They like dry and hot which is why it’s the worst in our homes in the winter time. That rack got left outside over night once and then stayed out the next day during torrential downpour. That rain, luckily, didn’t hurt the plants but it might have further helped to wash off any mites. Plus the cooler night temps might have helped to make them less active.
The next step is chemical. Now I have been spraying the petunia and some of the other plants close to it with insecticidal soap, till I ran out. I switched over to Jack’s Dead Bug. I must say I don’t feel like it’s been helping with the white fly but then it does not specifically say it’s for white fly, maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t.
In our mutli product attack plan we will be rotating:
week 1 – Jack’s Dead Bug
week 2 – Neem Oil
week 3 – Malathion
week 4 – Pyrethrin
week 5 – Nuke em
Then we will repeat that for at least one more cycle for a total of 10 weeks worth of treatment. At the start of each treatment I will again try and repeat the rinsing in the sink of any spider mites that I see.
There are several things that are very important to us. We don’t want something that stays in the plant that we might end up ingesting. We also don’t want to hurt friendly bugs, animals, or pollinators. In the house we don’t need to worry about friendly bugs or pollinators but we do need to think about pets and ourselves. We blocked off access so pets are not a worry but we still don’t want to eat a bunch of chemicals. This isn’t the sixties anymore after all.
Luckily we noticed the problem on the flowers. None of the veggies have been impacted yet. BUT we still want to be careful.
Things I did not know:
- You can’t just spray once kill them and be done.
- I did not know you have to repeat treatment every 2 – 3 days to break their life cycle.
- I did not realize they quickly can become resistant to any product you use all the time.
- I did not know that organics tend to not stick around very long so the residual effect is quickly lost, you have to keep repeating which can lead to resistance.
- Insecticidal soaps kill on contact and that’s it.
- You have to be careful of combining products. If you use a product with sulfur you cannot apply any type of oil for 30 days or they become toxic to plants.
Because we are fighting this in the house we are going a little more nuclear, stopping just short of fire. Will any of this work? I don’t know. I feel like I know a lot more about my enemy than I have ever known before. Armed with info and a plan we are hopeful that we can get this knocked out before they kill everything and before they go outside. So far, fingers crossed, we have not seen any signs of mites since Thursday and it’s Saturday today. Every other day we have been spraying with Dead Bug and we have been pushing that cart outside during the day to hopefully keep them in an environment that slows them down. We will continue with Dead Bug till next Wednesday when I will switch over to the Neem Oil. I’m half tempted to give them a wash before using each new product just to hopefully wash off anything before it can gain traction.
UPDATE: It has been one week. Everyday I go down and check for new webs or mites. Everyday I find some, at least on the plants that were most heavily infested. Up till last night I had been removed plants I saw webs on and rinsing them in the sink before spraying Dead Bug. Last night I started NEEM and I did not remove any plants except one. My fear was that by jiggling them around I might be spreading the mites. Maybe leaving them in place and just spraying is better. While I’m still seeing mites they do not seem to be spreading. I think I am also only finding them on the plants which had the worst infections.
The white fly seem to have finally been defeated at least on that poor petunia. I also did not see any on other plants last night so there is hope.
The animals or us may have brought these things in because we have all been in the garden or working outside. Which is how they magically seemed to appear. I’m also suspicious of some dirt/fertilizer that I started using which had been in the basement and some of it was open. These products had been down there last year when we had a HUGE problem with both mites and white fly. They killed off all my dill, my basil, and sadly my jasmine. I had just started using those products but adding them after I had done the hot water baptism of the dirt. I have also stopped using the mosquito killing pellets when watering. Maybe those pellets had also been keeping other pests down. Maybe it’s some combo or maybe it’s non of the above because those are the three things that changed right before they appeared, my money is on at least one of them.
None of this is new information and I’m not going to claim to be an expert. I am going to link to the products that we will be using, the videos that were used for research, and hopefully make it a little easier to understand, because I was confused and my mistakes don’t have to be your mistakes.
Garden Answer – She has good content and years of experience working in a nursery environment as well as her own Youtube channel.
Epic Gardening – I like his videos. This video is another content creator who collaborates with Epic. She shows pics of how to identify the problem.
Garden Fundamentals – He kind of reminds me of my dad plus he has a lot of good content. He is very complete with his information so his videos can be longer but when you need to know, you need to know.
Hopefully you will never need to know any of this. I’m hoping that we get this dealt with and behind us so that our flowers and garden can flourish. The first time we had a problem it started with the marigolds and I did not catch it in time because I had no clue what I was looking for. I used insecticidal soap only, I probably did not spray it frequently enough or for a long enough period, and we lost flats of flowers. To make it even worse I took the ones that made it outside and planted them. We then fought mites on the roses and the grapes and we lost at least two grapes. White flies that started in the house ended up in the greenhouses where they laid waste to all the melons, the peppers and the tomatoes in the greenhouse. This year I want to stop the problem before I take it outside.
This year I also know I can’t stop just because it looks like things are okay. I need to finish the full course of treatment. I think that’s why I have always failed. I don’t do enough, frequently enough, or change it up enough.
I also learned that with my old eyes I have been missing things. I now wear my reading glasses and I use a flashlight when looking for the mites. I discovered that by accident. I had looked over a tray and said all good. I just happened to have the flashlight in my hand and I was talking to Bill who was watering. My inner child took over and I started playing with the flashlight. On a particularly good light saber swing the beam caught the shimmer of a web. End of game, time to be serious and sure enough I saw a web with mites that were alive. I had missed these on my first check. Now I check everything with the flashlight and it has helped a lot.
