Hey, good morning, it's Jason again from Fraser Valley Rose farm today
I want to talk to you about spider mites and specifically how to get rid of them both in indoor and outdoor growing situations
So spider mites are a problem for me because at a certain time of year when I'm cultivating all these roses
I grow lots of roses for sale locally here when the weather changes it gets a little bit warmer
It gets a little less humid. What happens is the spider mites
Come on
and
How I can tell is because an otherwise healthy growing Rose like this one here has good green leaves on the top I can pull
Off one of these lower leaves
Which is starting to look a little bit yellowish a little bit mottled
just unhealthy in general and if I turn it over I can see that there is
Webbing and I can see that there are spider mites on there if I look real close
So I wanted to talk to you about why spider mites are
So difficult to handle and particularly. I wanted to say that there's a distinction between indoor growing situations and
Outdoor growing situations - a growing situation like this. I'll deal with a little bit later. Let's talk about inside
Let's go inside and have a look at there's a tent that I put together
where I'm doing a trial on growing some rose plants underneath artificial lighting and
Almost immediately upon going in there. I noticed that the spider mite levels went way up. So why is that? Well, it's warm
it's dry and
the they have no natural predators in there, so
Spider mites in general are pretty hard to deal with they're small. They hide behind their webbing on the undersides of leaves
It's they're hard to reach with sprays. They reproduce really really quickly and they have an egg generation underneath there as well
So if you even if you wipe out the adults the eggs will soon hatch
Indoor situation you have no change in weather that's going to rescue you
So it's not all the sudden going to get
Cooler and wetter outside and suddenly your spider mite populations will drop off and you don't have access to all the same beneficial insects
So when you have this problem inside either on a grow tent or on your houseplants
You kind of have to take it into your own hands and there's a couple of different ways. You can do that
So I'm going to talk about first
spraying and second of all
Beneficial insects, so I'll treat those as two separate categories. So let's say about the spraying
It is less expense to get into the spraying. Typically you can buy
Insecticidal soap like this for less than $10 at your local garden center or hardware store and that gets you going
So it's not expensive to get started. You can find it locally. It's readily available
You don't have to order away for it
And when the infestation is severe and you want to take action right away, you don't want have to order beneficials
This is a good way to get going on it. On the down side
It is time consuming to use correctly because you have to reach the undersides of all the leaves where the spider mites can be
Spraying it on can be a little correctly can be a little bit difficult and you do have to do frequent applications to obtain control
You may even have to rotate products. So as I say the insecticidal soap is one way to go about it
I'll talk to you about some of the other sprays now quickly the predatory mites have different attributes
The predatory mites are usually a little more expensive to apply to the crop, but they are
Easy to apply and they offer you good control over a good length of time so it doesn't take as much time
From you to apply and you'll usually get good control, but it is a little more expensive. It's not readily available
You'll have to order it in and apply it all at once there
So now let's do with the sprays what I have this loaded up with is insecticidal soap
That's my first line of defense aside from the insecticidal soap. Let's talk about which works by attacking the
Exoskeleton of the of the I guess he's going to call it the arthropod here. So the
The spider mites if you directly apply it to the adult spider mites it will dry them out
Like I say direct application is difficult because you have to reach past all that webbing
You have to apply it pretty heavily and all the way to the undersides of the leaves
But it can be fairly effective at knocking down their populations a second way. You can approach it is by neem oil
I'll try to list some of these products on my amazon store so you can see some examples of which products I'm talking about
but neem oil affects the pests directly and also by
interfering with their reproductive patterns, so you'll actually
Disrupt that egg production in the spider mite so they don't continue to reinfest your plants so quick
The third one I can recommend a little more hesitant about is actually poison. It's a
Pyrethrum or pyrethrins and those come from a natural chrysanthemum Daisy so you could call them a natural approach
But they're toxic in their own way and you still have to take caution in applying them to your plants. So
What they do is of course
They will kill both the adult cycle and the egg cycle if applied fully to the to the undersides of your leaves
so if you rotated through all three of those different spray approaches and
Did that on a rotation of three to four days just to break the life cycle of those spider mites?
you can probably obtain fairly good control and
Once you've done so then after that you'll just have to keep up vigilance
You'll have to keep on checking the underside to your leaves checking your plants and see if the spider mites are reappearing
so
You know
It might take three or four applications to begin with to obtain control
And then after that you just have to do some scouting. So let me show you how to do the application here and
Like I say it's really really important that you get the undersides of these leaves
so if I'm looking at this one here, I'm going to actually turn the pot and get all the way underneath here and
Really don't be sparing with this hit it with a large amount you may even get in there and
Rub the bottom sides of the leaves now
obviously this is going to take a long time to do and if you have a large crop if you're doing a
Great number of plants, you know, you might not be able to get in there individually hit the leaves
I've forgot a step and really it's just a basic one
But before you start that what I would do is I would manually remove some of the worst infected leaves
So if I see ones that are like just crawling with spider mites the plants damaged there. Anyway, it's not gonna be productive tissue
So I'll pull off that tissue there just to get rid of the worst of it and also open up the growth of the plant
A little bit so that I have access to the spraying
Okay quickly. Let's talk about the beneficial insects that you can use in this situation
Like I say usually for these ones here
You have to source them either through your local grocer or your local garden store local agriculture store
You can order them online and typically they're not that
cheap so
The I think the cheapest I've seen them online is like 25 or 30 dollars
I'm pretty sure they're shipping on top of that
and that's for a
Predatory mite called persimilis. Persimilis is a little red mite that goes around and attacks the spider mite eggs and the adults
and
it reproduces quite quickly its voracious and
it has a life cycle itself that will it'll consume everything that's there and then it will probably die out or even
Even cannibalize its own population is what I've heard from other people. So it's a it's a short term maybe two to three week
goal to eradication if you've placed the appropriate amount of them in there and then
Both the pests and the predator will be gone. So that's
Pretty awesome, right?
quick
quick working
Decent lasting and full eradication the problem is of course. There's not a lot of residual there
So just like with after you finished your spray program
You will have to continue to scout and see if you if they're coming back or if there's no source of them coming in
It might be worth and I only have mentioned for similars as the might it might be worth looking for one called
Fallacis and I'll put the name down here on the screen as well
The reason I say that is because it's good for indoor situations, and it's also decent for an outdoor
greenhouse situation like this or even outdoors
They're a little bit more
Generalized so they will attack their spider mites
They'll also feed on thrips and if they don't have either of those guys around they'll feed on pollen
Which is pretty awesome for me cuz I have lots of flowers lots of pollen
so those those predatory mites will stick around for a long time in my growing situation and
Continue to provide benefit for weeks and months to come
In fact, I believe that Fallacis a native predator here. So it's present in my landscape already at least in small numbers
So adding a big population into my greenhouse or to an indoor growing situation
fantastic for me
I will say one other thing about spider mites
Let's just switch from the indoor approach to the outdoor approach. So I said indoors you really have to take this into your own hands
Outdoors. I have a general approach to pest control which is that I do as little as I possibly can
Aside from providing
Plantings to promote those beneficial insects if I can handle if I can have say Western redcedar in the landscape
That's a good overwintering territory for that philosophy that I talked about
And so when the spider might start to come up in the greenhouse
Then the Predators will have a way to move in and bring them under control and they do in my greenhouse
I usually get a two to three week
long hard outbreak of spider mites and then suddenly
Even though the weather is still quite warm
The population is start to diminish and if I look underneath the leaves I can see a lot of predated mites
They're kind of wiped out by all of the beneficial. It's not just those nights but also
Pirate bugs I'll see you know all sorts of
Beneficials and predators coming in there to wipe out those spider mite populations because hey, it's easy pickins
so that's what I do in my outdoor landscape is I don't
Really bother with it a whole lot by this time in the year by August my rose sales are down anyway
So if I have a little bit of spider mite damage and it damages the foliage, I'm not too worried about it
I'll let nature take its course. I will make the exception to this only if I see that a plant is
distressed or damaged or
Seriously to the point of death or or some some some way that I don't want to allow the damage to continue then I will
Apply the same kinds of countermeasures. I would inside either by putting on insecticidal. So by applying a pyrethrum
Product or pyrethrum product or by putting on neem oil or by releasing predatory mites?
So really I just take that same approach I would use for an indoor grow room bring it to the outside
All right. I hope that answers some of your questions about spider mites. You may have some questions about identification or
their lifecycle or anything else
please leave those in the bottom of the
Of the video under the in the comments and I'll be happy to answer those and thank you so much for watching today