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