HOW TO CONTROL SPIDER MITES IN YOUR GARDEN

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'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