Spider Mites Took Over My Garden... Here's What I Did

Hi everyone. Jamie here. Welcome back to my garden. I am working in my back garden today and I have sad news. I have spider mites. I'm very sad about that. Well, you know, it's, it's pretty normal to get spider mites where I live cause we have really hot, dry weather. Um, but they've usually they've been at a level that doesn't really bother me too much. And if, if spider mites or if any other pests are at a level that doesn't bother me too much, I tend to kind of leave them alone or maybe I'll spray them with water or something like that because I don't want to upset the balance of bad pests to good pests, to birds, to, you know, pollinators in my garden. But sometimes it gets to the point that I actually have to take some action and unfortunately I'm pretty sure I have to take some action today. So let me show you what's going on back here. All right. So I am working in the back garden today and I am particularly paying attention to these two beds right here and these two beds right here. Now these two beds I initially planted in the beginning of the season. I had planted Coconut Appeal Thunbergia and I thought it would be so pretty to have this growing up the panels and just creating like this big wall of foliage. I thought it would be so great. But as you can see, that really hasn't happened. Anytime it's grown up the panels, it started dying out and I didn't know if there was, at first it was like, is it a watering issue? Is it like an aphid issue? Is it just too hot for it? Right. And then I started suspecting that possibly I could have spider mites. And the reason why I started suspecting that is because I noticed what's called stippling on the leaves of my Thunbergia and stippling is when you notice there's like little white speckles on the leaves. And what that is, what that is is it's the bugs eating the leaves, like eating little parts of the leaves and taking away the chlorophyll. Um, and so they're like basically bite marks of the leaves. And if you see stippling on the leaves of, of, uh, your plants, you definitely have to think, okay, I probably have spider mites. If you live in a hot, dry climate, if you live in a more humid climate, there are other things that could be, but if you live in a hot, dry climate and it's been really hot and windy, um, I want you guys to think probably spider mites. Now the best thing that you could do for spider mites is you can catch it early and you can spray it with water because if you increase the humidity of the area, spider mites don't like high humidity. And so sometimes you can catch the issue before it gets out of hand. And that's always my first go-to is spraying my plants with water rather than spraying them with an insecticide or spraying them with horticulture oil or excuse me, horticulture soap, no horticulture oil or soap. Insecticidal soap, um, or anything like that. Because my goal is is to keep my garden as natural as possible because the more natural I keep my garden, the more balance there's going to be between good bugs and bad bugs. Cause if I knock out all of the bugs, then I also won't have any good bugs and my, I'm going to have a really hard time keeping my garden pest free. So I never want to act too quickly. However, if it starts getting out of hand, like these garden beds have suddenly started getting out of hand, the whole plants are gone. And if you look really closely, you can start to see webbing, like little webbing. And when you start to see that, you know, you kind of have a problem and you kind of have to do something to it. Um, and so spider mites eventually will make little web like look like spider webs and then you'll see little white bugs on them. And that's when, you know, you probably have to do something and spider mites spread really quickly. So I'm starting to get worried about my poor angelonia over here. Um, I think they've already started attacking, uh, started attacking my, um, my supertunias over here. And then they definitely have started attacking my dahlias. You look right there. So you can see the stippling. I don't see any web. Oh, I do see webbing here. Oh, this is not good. So I definitely have an infestation of spider mites and I think I'm going to have to spray today. Um, which I, again, I don't like to do this. Oh my gosh. You guys look at this. Look at that webbing. Oh my God. Okay. So this is bad. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull these two beds right here and I'm going to throw everything away. It's not going in the compost pile. It's immediately getting thrown away. And so that way it's going to take most of the problem out. I'm going to cut this back, but not a ton because this I think I can still save over here. And then what I'll do is finally I'll get out and I'll, I'll spray probably some Captain Jack's dead bug or whatever I have, uh, in my stash right here. And then I'm going to repeat that a couple of times over the next week just to make sure that I really take care of the problem, um, and can basically stop it in its tracks. So, and then in between that amount of time in between my sprays, I'm going to come out here every day with my water and spray these plants to overhead spray with these plants just to make sure that the spider mites don't have a good place to kind of, uh, take hold of. Right. If I keep everything kind of watered, then they're not going to be as happy and they're not going to spread as quickly. So not a fun video. Well, I should say, not a fun chore to do in the garden today, but it, it definitely needs it. And I did let it get out of control just cause I was so focused on other things. I think that I kept hoping this was going to take care of itself and it just didn't. So now my goal is to try and get as much of these leaves out of my garden bed as possible because you have to think the spider mites are hanging out in these leaves and I don't want them staying there. Spider mites can't live more than a couple of days in bare soil, but they can live on leaves. So the more leaves I get out of here, the better off I'll be. Okay. One bed all done. The majority of the leaves are taken out. I can probably get in there and get a leave in a little more. I could probably go even crazier and keep going. All right. On to the second bed. All right. All right. So all the infected plants are removed. It's kind of sad to see, but it actually feels good to kind of get them out of here. And then I also did cut back the dahlias over here and even took out some of the supertunias that were really infected over in this bed over here. So now let's talk about how to properly dispose of infected garden, garden waste. You don't want to put it directly in your own compost because most likely your own compost is not getting hot enough to kill the infection. Some people will say that when you take stuff out like this, you put it in plastic bags, tie the plastic bag and dispose of it in the trash. I personally don't think that's necessary unless you're dealing with like some really weird infection. But for something like this, I know there's spider mites out in the rest of my garden. So to isolate it to that extent and to use plastic to isolate it is kind of, kind of a waste, right? It's kind of a waste of time and it's a waste of using plastic because I know there's spider mites, you know, on plants over here and plants over here. There's spider mites everywhere. It's an open environment. I would say if you were working in like a greenhouse situation, then maybe that might make sense. But for me in this situation, that doesn't, that doesn't make any sense at all. So don't put it in your own compost and you can put it in your trash or if you have a green waste collection like I do, my city will has gives us bins to pick up green waste. What you want to do is you want to look into your city's green waste collection and you want to see how they dispose of it and if they are certified, and I always forget the name of the certification, but basically what it states is that they properly monitor and manage their compost when they take the green waste from people's homes, residents homes, and then they start composting it. They manage it and they make sure that it gets hot enough to kill the infection, to kill the bugs, to kill whatever, whatever issues going on with that green waste so that when they create the compost, the compost doesn't, isn't harboring any of that kind of stuff. And my, my county's green waste, they are certified. They do a great job. They have great compost. I love using their compost. Um, and so I just take this stuff and I dispose of it in my green waste bins because I know my city is going to take care of it. But make sure you check your local city or your local county and make sure that they're disposing of it properly. Okay, so let's talk about sprays now. Okay, so I went and I grabbed four different sprays that would work for my spider mite infestation. I actually wish I had one more. I wish I had insecticidal soap that I could show you guys because that's a really good option as well. Probably one of the best options. Um, but I don't have that on hand. So the number one thing that when you have an infestation in your garden, you have to identify it. That's the most important number one priority is identifying what you have going on because that will lead you to selecting the most specific treatment. And you really want to do the most specific treatment because by using takedown spray or dead bug spray, I'm going to get the problem, but I'm also going to get a bunch of other things that aren't problems. And I am putting my garden at risk for a rebound effect, which is basically means you've killed everything in your garden. Um, and that includes the good bugs. And so now everything comes back with a vengeance basically. So you want to be really careful in selecting, um, uh, what you're going to use and knowing what you have going on is the best thing that you can do. Uh, so all four of these say they treat spider mites, but they all treat them a little bit differently. Neem oil is probably the most organic. Well, it is the most organic, but with neem oil, you want to make sure it says clarified hydrophobic extract of neem oil on it. There's two different types of neem oil and they will only work on spider mites if it says that because spider mites are actually, they're, they're not spiders, they're arachnids. And the way that you kill them is you smother them. You smother the mites and you smother their eggs and that's how you kill them as opposed to other bugs that you want to actually ingest the, the insecticide or miticide. And that's how it kills them. And that's how this works, which is spinosad. And that's how this works, which is pyrethrin. And that's actually how bacillus thuringiensis BT works with, um, with budworms. Um, but because with spider mites, because, you know, because I know I'm dealing with spider mites based on my environment and based on the symptoms and what I have going on and I've actually seen them, then I know that I'm going to need to smother them. Um, and that's where neem oil works, but horticulture oil works probably even better and insecticidal soap works better because that is actually what they're meant to do is they're meant to smother the insects. So that's probably a better situation is choosing something like horticulture oil versus neem oil or versus Captain Jack's or take down spray. So I do think, I know I was talking about Captain Jack's, but I do think that I'm actually going to use horticulture oil on the surrounding plants because I've already taken away the main infestation. This is just on like my Dahlias and my Angelonia. So I think that this will work really well. And I do think that, um, uh, the, the most important thing you have to think about is coverage, because when you're dealing with smothering, you want to make sure that you, you know, obviously smother it as opposed to something like this. You want to get good coverage because you want the bugs to actually eat it. Uh, now I'm not going to push you guys away from using these because they will absolutely work on spider mites. They say spider mites like right here on the label. Um, but they're just not going to be as, um, strict as focused as getting the spider mites. And I know that I really am just dealing with spider mites and I don't care about anything else. I use last year, I use take down spray on my spider mites on my three containers over in front of my metal workshop. And it worked really, really well. So I'm not going to push you guys away from that. Now if you go to the garden center and you get something like this, this is a ready to use and you know, you can just spray it right away. If you get something like this, this is a concentrate and this has to be diluted in something like this. And this is my hose link hose and sprayer. I absolutely love this thing because it says right on here, the dilution ratio. And so all you have to do is look on the back of the concentrate package, look up what the dilution ratio is, and then bring it over here. And this will tell you what number to turn the dial to. And then you just put it in here and you start, you hook it up to your hose link and you're ready to go. So I really, really like this thing. I think it's great. And I will definitely use it. However, because I've decided to use horticulture oil, really all of these, you don't want to use any of these. Um, when it's, when the sun's out and when it's too hot and it's going to be over a hundred degrees today. So, um, and I took a little too long taking out all the other plants. So I think it's a little too late in the afternoon or in the morning for me to spray any of these things, because if you think about it, it's oil. And when you have oil on plants and then you mix that with sun, it's basically magnifying the effects of the sun. And so it could burn your, your, the leaves of your plants that you spray it on. So I'm actually going to come out tonight after the sun goes down and I'm going to spray the horticulture oil and I'm going to continue doing that every couple of days. But in between those treatments, I'm going to spray everything down with water and by spraying it down with water, it's making it really humid and it's making, um, uh, the environment not a good hospitable environment for the spider mites. So this is my plan or, or this is my plan for dealing with my situation of spider mites. If I saw other bugs or I wasn't a hundred percent sure what I had going on, or it could be something else. Then maybe I would think about using the dead bug, but because I'm 99.9% sure that it's just spider mites that I'm dealing with, I'm going to use this horticulture oil tonight. I probably won't film it cause it will probably be too dark. Now I know I already mentioned this when I was pulling the plants out, but spider mites can't live in soil. They, they can only live for a very short period of time in soil. So the soil is not something that you have to spray with anything. Like I don't have to, I don't have to spray my horticulture oil, or insecticidal soap in the soil, but I would spray the surrounding areas. But for now, since the sun's out and it's going to be over a hundred degrees today, this morning, I'm going to give everything a really, really good soak, which I can do because it's nice and dry and, and hot here and the plants actually respond better if I give it a overhead watering. I know a lot of you who live in really humid environments. Um, you don't want to spray your plants overhead, but you're not dealing with spider mites like I'm dealing with. You have other things that you're dealing with other problems that you're dealing with. So I'm going to go through and I'm going to spray everything right now. Tonight I'm going to spray the horticulture oil and then I'm going to repeat that a couple of times. I'm going to spray every single day, but I'm going to repeat the horticulture oil a couple of times over the next week or so. So I don't see any signs of stippling or anything like that on my Angelonia just yet, but I'm still going to treat them as though there's an issue because I know there's spider mites around. I know they're looking for a happy spot to live and so I'm just going to overhead water these and then tonight I am going to spray them with the horticulture oil. The poor Supertunias right here definitely got affected. And then I'm even going to overhead water my roses, which I know, you know, the recommendation for a lot of the country is to not overhead spray roses. But for us here in a hot, dry climate, it's exactly what you want to do. And my friend Linda, who is a master Rosarian, she overhead waters her roses a couple times a week during the hot part of the summer because, because of, of bug control and you know, keeping them healthy and keeping the bugs off of them. So it's definitely a good thing to do, especially if you have spider mites. Okay, so I'm just going to finish continuing spraying overhead watering my garden just to make sure that any of the spider mites, they are not happy. They're not, they're not loving this area. And so hopefully they will not reproduce and they will go away. So anyway, hopefully this video was somewhat helpful for you guys. I think the, the important takeaways of this video is one, don't freak out if you have an infestation, you know, it's normal. It's normal to have ebbs and flows in your garden and it's good to have some bad bugs so that the good bugs can eat it. And then two, I think the other most important thing is make sure you work on identifying what you have. That is, that's going to get you the, the most results. The quickest is figuring out what you have. So the best thing you can do for yourself is really work on identification, looking at the leaves, thinking about your environment, thinking about the situation, thinking about the weather. Um, take some of the infected leaves in a plastic bag to your local garden center or your master gardeners, call your master gardeners. You know, there's so many things that you can do, but being able to identify first off, what you have going on is going to help you treat it so much better. So I hope you guys enjoyed this. I'm going to continue on with spring. I actually actually kind of like spring. It's, it's nice. And if I get hot, I can just do that. So anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this and I hope you all have a chance to get in your garden today.