growing pest and disease free plants is every gardeners goal but sometimes pests
like spider mites can destroy your plants in today's video we'll look at
how to control and get rid of spider mites in your garden so how do you
identify a spider mite infestation on your plants well the first thing you
will notice is yellow and brown leaves a reduction in foliage on your plants this
especially happens in the heat of the summer season when it's hot and dry and
you will also notice some kind of webbing or spider like webs around your
leaves and then finally you will see that there are a lot of these red
insects which are very tiny that are running up and down on your plant leaves
so how do you get rid of them the first thing you need to do is prune your
affected leaves especially the leaves that are brown and yellowing and then
make sure you discard them properly so what we are doing here is we are trying
to prune the leaves that are beginning to become yellow that have the spider
mites under them and what this does is it lessens the spider mite population
right away because spider mites can fly from one plant to the other by reducing
the number of leaves that are affected by the spider mites you are preventing
them from breeding and you're preventing them from getting overpopulated and
remember that spider mites multiply very quickly so as soon as you see an
infestation make sure you prune the leaves and do not put them in your
compost bin what you want to do is discard them in your green waste so that
you do not get those spider mites in your garden again so the first question
is what do you prune so you need to examine your plants these plants growing
in the raised bed had a spider mite infestation and you can see a lot of
leaves that are damaged and this is a good example of another leaf that has a
spider mite damage so these are the kind of leaves that you should be pruning now
once you prune the leaves there will be new leaves that will be growing and once
you have control your spider mites those new leaves should not have the same
spider mite infestation so look at how to eradicate them so the
best way to start approaching a spider mite problem is to use water jets now by
just using your water hose you are literally spraying the spider mites away
you are displacing them from the plant and this creates a nice moist
environment for your plants and the spider mites absolutely hate it so this
is your first step you're preparing an environment where the spider mites will
not thrive and now the next step is to start using some organic spider mite
control now this is the most effective product that I find that's available to
control spider mites organically and this product by Dr. Earth is a mix of a
lot of good oils like rosemary oil sesame oil cinnamon
oil and this combination is very effective at controlling spider mites
and rosemary oil especially is very effective against spider mites so I
highly recommend this product and this attaches to a garden hose just a regular
garden hose so you don't have to measure you don't have to estimate how much you
need to spray and this is how it fits into the garden hose and all you do is
use the knob that turns on the water to start spraying your plants and I
recommend this product over neem oil very strongly because although neem oil
is good it's not as great in controlling spider mites and then once you have the
hose attached you spray your plants very well the under side and over side of the
leaf should be thoroughly wet once you're spraying your plant and what this
does is it uses the oils that are there in the product to completely smother the
spider mites which are you know hiding in the leaves of the plants so it's a
great product I highly recommend this you can buy this product using the
product link that I've specified in the comments below and this is definitely
much more effective than neem oil I've tried using neem oil and this is a much
better solution and once this is done you will start
noticing an immediate difference this plant was totally infested by spider
mites and after pruning and after keeping it moist and spraying this plant
it now looks a lot better we are now going to see the heavy pruning technique
for the plants that were growing in this raised bed these had a very bad spider
mite infestation these tomato plants are for growing in the raised bed and as you
can see here they are loaded with tomatoes and I had to remove the foliage
that was affected by the spider mites now spider mites can affect tomatoes
eggplants and a lot of other plants and once again I would like to tell you that
when you prune your leaves your bad leaves that were affected by spider
mites do not put them in your compost bin commercially made compost is heated
to get rid of the spider mites or other insects but homemade compost is
something that is not heated to that extent so avoid putting insect or pest
affected leaves in your compost bin and I know that spider mites are a big
problem for a lot of gardeners so I hope this video inspires you to be confident
in controlling spider mites in your garden and I'm sure that by following
these steps you can have a garden that's free of spider mites so there we have it
folks that was our episode on controlling spider mites in your garden
we looked at how we control spider mites on our tomato plants and I hope you can
follow these techniques to keep your garden free from spider mites
we'll see you again soon happy gardening