Alexis, Spider mites usually are present for a long time in low numbers, but what happens is that higher temperatures cause their reproductive rate to speed up. Once we are having hot summer weather, 'baby' spider mites can go from hatching from an egg to egg-laying in as little as 7 days, whereas the reproductive cycle in spring is much slower. Each spider mite can lay 100-300 eggs, so you can see why the population just seems to skyrocket suddenly. I usually see the first spider mites in my garden as early as April, but don't really see the overall population explode until sometime between late June and late July.

This year, the spider mites hit the front garden in May, got pretty bad for a while, but mostly are gone now. They didn't start hitting the back garden until July, but their population has skyrocketed in the last couple of weeks. I have them mostly on cucumbers in the back garden, but also on some of the tomato plants back there as well.

Success fighting spider mites is highly variable. Some years all I do is put a hose nozzle on my water hose and turn it to a 'jet' setting that puts out a pretty forceful stream of water and I hit the undersides of each and every leaf once or twice a day. You might have to do it for several days to several weeks, but it sometimes helps....and sometimes doesn't.

Spraying with neem can be iffy. First of all, read the label on your bottle of neem. It should tell you how often it can be applied to tomato plants. I think the label on my bottle says to spray it at 7-10 day intervals. There can be issues with using neem, though, not the least of which is that it is toxic to bees. Because of that, I rarely use it, and when I do use it, I use it just before twilight when the bees are through foraging for the day.

Some people find neem to be highly effective on spider mites. Some don't. You won't know how it will work for you on your plants until you try it.

Neem isn't an instant kill product when used for spider mites. It functions more like an anti-feedant,so first they stop feeding, then a few days later they are dead. You have to keep spraying regularly, though, to get the new ones that are continually hatching out. If you already have a huge infestation before you start spraying, it may be too late in the infestation cycle for the neem to kill enough of them to save the plants.

My bottle of neem oil says not to spray when temperatures are above 90 degrees. If you spray plants with neem in the summer months when temperatures are pretty hot, it can cause the tomato leaves to look like crap and to curl. So, sometimes it seems like it makes the plants look worse instead of better, and it may kill spider mites and it may not. The bad news is that more mites just keep coming because they can travel on the wind as well as the fact that the hotter it gets, the faster their reproductive cycle speeds up.

How well neem oil works for you may depend on what sort of neighborhood you live in and also on what kind of spider mite problem exists. I live in a very rural area with open pasture land/range land/hay fields all around us...on all 4 sides. Spider mites live in all those fields and blow in on the wind and they are a problem every year, and a huge problem in probably 9 out of 10 years. Nothing I do really slows them down much or stops them, so I just ignore them. Eventually they will kill some of the plants, but others will survive. I just plant enough tomato plants that the world doesn't end if some of them die. They are highly selective and, in my garden at least, they seem to prefer tomato and cucumber plants to everything else. They also like verbena bonariensis, though it usually can outlast them.

I have them all over the cucumber plants, which are growing on a trellis with four walls and a ceiling like a house. Inside the cucumber house, I have sweet pepper plants (so they can grow in the shade provided by the cucumber house). The cucumber plants have spider mites simply covering the foliage...top, bottom, all over. The pepper plants don't have a single spider mite on them as of this morning. With the tomato plants, there are some mites, but not in the big numbers like I'm seeing on the cucumber plants.

If you are in a more urban or suburban setting, you might not have spider mites all around your property in such high numbers and spraying with neem might work just fine on the ones you have.

It also depends on whether we're talking about red (two-spotted) spider mites or some other kind of mite, like tomato russett mites. I don't know if neem works on tomato russett mites. The normal recommended treatment for TRM is sulphur, but you cannot spray both sulfur and neem on the same plants because together they can severely damage and kill tomato plants.

Usually if you can see the mites on the foliage with the naked eye, you have two-spotted mites or some other kind that is not tomato russet mites. The TRMs are not visible to the naked human eye. If you only see obvious spider mite damage and not spider mites, you might have TRMs.

Your plants still look pretty good overall considering it is August in Oklahoma, so I think it would be worth your while to try to fight the mites.

In future years, watch for them on the undersides of the leaves early in the season. If you see them then before the temperatures get too hot, you can treat with neem, insecticidal soap or a superfine/summerweight horticultural oil. I really like the horticultural oil, but don't like to use it at hot temperatures. All these products work just fine in May when used according to label directions, but then the hotter it gets in summer, the higher the chance that using them can result in phytotoxicity because of our high temperatures. I just won't spray much at all on plants once we are above 90 degrees.

Another option that may or may not work for you is a combination product that contains canola oil and pyrethrins. I have a spray bottle of Take Down in my potting shed, and have used it even at high temperatures with no damage to the plants, but I spray it sparingly and usually only on the worst, hardest-to-kill pests, like leaf-footed bugs, stink bugs and squash bugs. It generally kills them if I spray it directly on the pest.

Spider mites can travel from plant to plant on the wind, so if I was going to treat a few tomato plants for spider mites, I'd treat them all at the same time.

Whatever you do, don't spray your plants with a chemical pesticide. My dad used to spray his tomato plants with certain commonly-used chemical pesticides when I was a kid and even later on when I was a young adult living in the same neighborhood. Every time he sprayed those on his plants (one was the oft-recommended miticide called Kelthane, and other products he sprayed were pesticides like Sevin or Malathion), it would seem like they worked....for 2 or 3 or 4 days. Then, the population would rebound bigger and stronger. Knowing what I know now, I think the Kelthane likely was killing the beneficial mites that were helping keep his spider mite numbers lower (even though he couldn't have known that at the time because I don't think we even knew beneficial mites existed back then). Once the Kelthane killed the mites, the spider mites rebounded more quickly than the beneficial mites and that helped the spider mite population get even more out of control. With the pesticides, it was more or less the same issue where the pesticides killed the beneficial insects that were helping to control the mites.

After I began gardening organically when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, he gradually stopped using miticides and pesticides and had less of a spider mite issue than before, which astonished him.

I wonder now if neem would have helped his plants, but we cannot go backwards 20 or 30 or 40 years in time to see.

Whatever you do, remember that new mites will be hatching out literally every day, so once you select a course of action, stick to it consistently.

What I have found is that I can spend a lot of time and effort trying to control them, or I can do virtually nothing, and in either case. some plants survive and outlast them, and some plants don't.

Their population likely is at its peak right now, and by mid-August should start decreasing naturally. At least, that's what I have experienced here.

Good luck with them,

Dawn

Everything I've read says that neem oil is not toxic to bees unless sprayed directly on them. Where are you getting different information? I use neem oil sometimes, but only because I read that it is safe for bees provided you don't spray them with it.

Okievegan, When I said that it was toxic to bees, that is what I was saying---that you cannot directly spray it on plants where bees are foraging at the time you are spraying. That is precisely what the label on my bottle of neem states.

I suppose a person could spray the plants while bees were buzzing around and try to avoid hitting the bees that were present, but to me there's too much of a risk that a bee will fly into the spray as I'm spraying the plants (and my product label says not to do it).

My garden is roughly 10,000 square feet and is full of all kinds of flying things all day long, so I wait and spray in the evening after it quiets down in there and the bees return to their hives.

I didn't mean that you cannot spray it on the plants at all because bees might happen to visit the plants later. Once the neem oil is dry, it shouldn't hurt the non-targeted pests that were not directly sprayed.

The Neem Oil I have is a 70% formulation made by Monterrey and I've used it for years, although I don't use it often, and right on the label it says not to spray directly on the bees or in an area where bees are actively foraging. That's all I was trying to convey.

Sometimes, if I am outside by 6:15 or 6:30 a.m., I actually can make it into the garden before the bees arrive, and that's when I prefer to pick cucumbers and cut flowers for bouquets, because otherwise the bees and I are in each other's way. I likely could spray that early in the morning before the bees come out, but it is my crop-harvesting and flower-cutting time, so I just wait until evening.

I've linked the product label from the brand of Neem oil I use. I would think that the labels on most Neem products would say more or less the same thing.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: The Label From My Bottle of Neem

Thanks for the responses :) Dawn, don't worry- no chemicals here! This is actually only the third time I've used the Neem lol I'm really trying to go all natural no matter what. My garden is small so hand picking/smashing is working well so far. :) I know the mites were here and there but wow they sure did multiply! Its pretty impressive (more so if it wasn't my garden that was sustaining them lol). I am in a suburban area with "non-gardening" neighbors with the exception of one with a few squash plants and 2 tomatoes. So surely my mite population will be manageable, if not oh well! This is my first year and I'm having so much fun figuring out everything, ID'ing bugs, learning about the plants, researching varieties, but especially enjoying how big and amazing God's wonderful creation is and soaking up how much He must Love us to give us such a beautiful gift! Ill keep y'all posted on the mites, but it will be fine I'm sure.. Worst case I can always pull it to plant something else :) Thanks for the information!
Alexis

Alexis,

You're welcome.

It is hard to guess if your population will be manageable or not. My dad's garden, even in the 1960s, was filled with them every summer, and the homes in our neighborhood were built in the 1940s, so there really wasn't much wide open land around, especially grassland where the mites tend to proliferate. Of course, it was the 1960s and the widespread use of broad-spectrum, heavy-duty insecticides (including DDT) was very common back then and everyone I can remember (except my grandfather) sprayed often, and some of the insecticides they used really did seem to kill almost everything, but not the spider mites. It could be that their heavy pesticide use aggravated the spider mite issue by killing off all the beneficial insects, while not killing the mites.

One thing that sticks in my mind is that a very close friend of my dad, who lived and gardened about 3 blocks away, would have the spider mites hit his garden hard at exactly the same time their population suddenly skyrocketed in my dad's garden, and it happened every single year. They would talk about it endlessly and would try everything, but the more pesticide they sprayed, the worse it got. The same was true for other gardeners in our neighborhood.

So, while I think that spider mites, like many pests that inhabit fields and forests, might have higher populations out in the country, that does not necessarily mean you won't see high numbers in the city because you still might.

Spider mites are a problem on hundreds, if not thousands, of types of plants....there's even bermuda grass mites....but on our property the spider mites definitely prefer certain types of plants and will just cover up those plants while not touching other plants just mere inches away.

This is just one of those cases where you should do all you reasonably can do to fight the spider mites, but do it with the awareness that you cannot

Last year I looked at some tomato plants heavily infested with spider mites at the west end of my garden and considered yanking them out. Instead, I decided to just leave them alone and let them either survive or not, with no interference from me. I didn't spray the plants with anything, but merely made sure I watered them about once a week. Those tomato plants hung in there, outlasted the heat, drought and spider mites, and still were producing fruit when frost arrived. It is likely you'll experience the same thing with your plants, but there is no guarantee.

I am glad you are enjoying your first year gardening. Every year will be even more incredible as you watch and learn the ways that all of the flora and fauna interact with one another. It is pretty amazing, indeed, and the natural world is just full of amazing surprises. As a gardener and as a watcher of wildlife, I still learn something new every single day and enjoy it immensely.

Dawn