Its looking very promising!

Yum! I'm turning green with envy.

I used to overwinter a few tomato plants but don't like heating the greenhouse so just quit doing it. In an unheated greenhouse the fruits stayed small and took forever and a day to ripen, but even so, a home-grown tomato still beats a store-bought tomato any day of the week.

We only tried having greenhouse tomatoes one winter, year before last. By the end of January we had several early girls and Chadwick cherries, but we decided too much money for too little return. I did dig up a volunteer plant in the garden and it has one little tomato on it. It's on the porch, that I do still heat. I don't know what it is of course, except it appears to be a cherry.

Yours are looking good, definitely showing color.

We still have about a dozen "fresh" tomatoes, sitting on our kitchen counter. I enjoy slicing them into omelets.

George

I am overwintering my first tomato in my small greenhouse/potting shed, a Tumbling Tom, and have had a few tomatoes recently. They were incredibly tasty for the middle of winter! It is now getting mites (webs appearing on top of the plant and leaves dying) and I don't know what to treat it with. I tried some malathion, with little success, but don't want to contaminate the greenhouse with a lot of poisons. Any suggestions for a maintenance spray in this small 14x16 space?

This post was edited by Irishgal2 on Fri, Jan 23, 15 at 10:56

Once they have moved from the undersides of the leaves and you are starting to see the webbing, you have a pretty serious infestation. It might be too late to save the plant at this point, but I think you certainly should try.

If the spider mites are only on the one Tumbling Tom plant, the easiest way to attempt to gain control would be to spray the plant with a sharp stream of water that would knock the spider mites off the plants. Be sure to target both the top and the bottom of all foliage as well as all the plant's limbs or branches. Normally, if you do this for 3 or 4 days in a row, they stop coming back onto the plant and go elsewhere. Unfortunately, any time you are putting moisture on the tomato plants' leaves, you're increasing the odds that a foliar disease will develop (especially inside a greenhouse where the humidity often remains fairly high) so keep that in mind as you weigh the options.

You also could spray the plants with neem oil, following label directions, or with one of the many products like Pyola or Take Down Spray that combine pyrethrin with canola oil. Again, be sure to target the undersides of the leaves as well as the rest of the plant because the mites generally start out on the undersides of the leaves and then move onto the tops of the leaves as their population explodes.

Usually, about the worst thing a person can do when battling spider mites is to use a broad-spectrum insecticide because it will kill off the beneficial insects that have been keeping the spider mites under control. Often, you not only have the plant-sucking spider mites that are causing damage, but also predatory mites that feed on the spider mites. When you kill them off by spraying a broad-spectrum insecticide, the spider mites rebound first (because they feed on the plants.....the predator mite population doesn't rebound until later after there's plenty of spider mites to eat). So, each time you use a broad-spectrum insecticide, you run the risk of actually helping the damaging types of spider mites by wiping out a predator that feeds on them. I learned about this as a kid when my dad would spray his tomato plants with Kelthane when the spider mites showed up, and, since it was a miticide that was fairly effective at that time, it seemed like it killed them off. But, then, the population would rebound and he'd have more than before, so he'd spray again, and after a couple of weeks would have even more of them. Of course he was perpetuating the problem by killing off the mite predators, but he didn't know that at the time. So, out of frustration, he'd switch to Sevin, and the exact same cycle continued. I didn't understand why when I was a kid, but as an adult gardener who tries to garden as organically as possible, I now understand that the Sevin also was killing off the beneficials. Research that has been done in more recent years has confirmed that, for various reasons, spraying spider mites with Sevin actually causes the spider mite population to increase over the long term....so now I at least understand why he had that problem so long ago.

I have lady bugs inside my greenhouse all winter and they tend to keep the spider mites under control for me for the most part. I've never yet used any sort of insecticide or miticide inside the greenhouse and have no intention of ever doing so. It it hard enough to keep a healthy balance of beneficial insects in the greenhouse in winter without accidentally harming or killing off the ones that are in there.

I don't know what your level of experience with spider mites is, but since you're in zone 7, as are many of us herei n OK, I expect you've had to deal with them before. We have them here in OK from early spring through late autumn and they are just something a gardener has to deal with. About the only thing I ever do is hose them off the plants. Eventually the spider mite population either gets out of control in the worst July/August heat or it begins to drop. It sort of varies depending on what sort of summer weather we're having. If it becomes uncontrollable, I yank out the tomato plants, wait a few weeks, and plant fresh plants for fall. If the population begins to fall, as it did last summer, all my tomato plants rebound and recover and produce well in fall.

It can be a bit harder to control spider mites once they are inside a greenhouse, but I think it does help if you have vents you can open and a fan you can run to improve air flow on warm days. Cooling down the greenhouse while still keeping it above freezing can help. Spider mites reproduce at a higher rate as the temperatures heat up which is why their population explodes in summer.

Planet Natural has a great page on Spider Mite control. I'll find it and link it below. Of course, it does recommend products they sell but you also can find the equivalent of many of those products at local nurseries or garden centers too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Spider Mite Control

Dawn, thank you for the informative response. Yes, we've grown tomatoes in the Oklahoma heat for some 47 years now and do pretty much the same things you suggest for spider mites our garden.

However, I really wanted to eradicate the mites from my one hanging tomato in my small greenhouse before starting seeds, so I had decided to open all windows and doors and turn on the fan and spray it with the malathion. Spraying with a strong stream of water didn't seem like a good option at the time, because I was afraid it would just scatter them around inside my small space. While there really aren't any insects in there except an occasional spider, I don't intend to ever use it in there again.

I've cleaned up the plant completely and cut it back to fresh growth, and it appears to be regenerating. On the advice from a friend who grows hydroponically all year, I began spraying frequently with weak soapy water and my plant is looking much better. If that doesn't work, I will add a little Neem oil, as you suggest. The plant hangs high and heat is an issue for it on bright days, so I'll have to be very careful with the Neem. As always, your advice is appreciated and very sound. I would love to be able to keep a couple of winter tomatoes going each year, so this one is kind of my winter experiment.

Have you posted your tomato grow list for 2015 yet? I always look forward to reading it. My Opalka that I talked with you about last year did poorly, but boy were they big and tasty! Don't think I'll grow them again.

And busy1, your Porter looks wonderful!

Irishgal,

I hope that everything you did works. There is nothing worse in a greenhouse that I can think of than spider mites. Unfortunately, our beautiful, brilliantly sunny, warm (dare I say it almost feels hot for January?) weather is probably making those dastardly mites very happy.

I haven't posted my 2015 Grow List but it is coming very soon. I've worked on it for months, and think it is just about complete. I'll continue feeling that way until I look at someone else's list and see a variety I like but am not growing and ask myself "why didn't I choose that one?" My gut feeling is that I'm going to get a break from the near-constant drought during the growing season, so I'm going to grow some varieties that don't do particularly well in extreme heat and drought and then just hope the weather cooperates for once. Foolhardy plan, isn't it, but it's the path I've chosen.

Dawn