I have a finished basement, and in the room I'm in right now I was storing winter squash, picked in late September. At the end of November I noticed some of them were going "fuzzy", which I assumed meant they were going moldy. Alas, the fuzz was actually colonies of spider mites (never had that issue before this year). I threw out the squash and thought the mites would soon die without food. But 10 days later I'm still killing mites each day, even though there is nothing in this room for them to eat.

I have indoor pepper plants in the next room and I'm freaked that the mites will find those plants, maybe they already have and it won't become obvious for a few weeks until their population grows. I'm being careful now to limit my visits to the pepper plants to about once per day, to try and avoid contamination.

My question about how long mites live without food is based on 1)if they really haven't found the peppers yet, how long do I have to be careful of spreading things from my infested computer room to the grow-lights in the next room? And 2)assuming the mites have already spread or will spread soon to the peppers, how long do I need to have that space cleared out of all plants before I can seed my spring bedding plants without worry of being infected by leftover mites?

As they say....'Nuke 'em from orbit'...it's the only way to be sure.

Josh

I've totally cleared out all my plants for a couple months and all of a sudden there was a ton of webs hanging down from my Fluoros.
That was more than a month of no plants indoors.

The mites hibernate when things get bad,the fluoro housing was where they went.
I guess they don't mind the heat from the ballasts either.

They send egg ladened females into hiding when the colony gets into unfavorable conditions.

I don't know how long they can hibernate for or what wakes them up.

But I do believe what U.C.Davis and Cornell said about mites.
They are very hard if not impossible to get rid of but you can somewhat control them.

They easily get immune to most poisons and usually reproduce faster than beneficial bugs can eat them.
Pyrithrins(sp?) actually help mite reproduce according to what I've read.
Though there is a poison with Pyrithrin and sulfur that is supposed to work pretty well,I can't find the stuff at Homey Depote or the Nursery.
They do sell it online though.

I tried every beneficial mite eater sold by Tip Top Bio and several poisons and miticides that only worked 4-6 weeks max.

Over 3 years I bet i spent over $1000. in every so called mite killer in the book.
Neem was a total waste even though it's sold as a miticide.
Mites lined up every morning and evening with their bath brushes and robes on to get their neem shower.

Just plain water worked as well or better than 99% of the stuff I tried.

Outside hosing down my plants at dark thirty AM and at dusk kept them to reasonable levels.
Indoors I can't do that.

Green Lacewings seemed to help out more than ladybugs.
Ladybugs liked other stuff better I think where Lacewing larva(whatever) are into eating anything they can catch,including each other.

Read the warning on the no pest strip-not for food areas and not in places you spend 4 hours or more a day.
They also only last about 2 months not 4 like the label says.

I put mine indoors only when I see mites and for a week or so after , then it goes out in my shed to deal with the crickets and black widows.

I haven't found a water soluble form of sulfur yet but read that it kills mites.
I find lots of powders but no liquid.
I tried powders indoors and it was too much of a mess even when I took the plants outside to treat them.
The powder ended up everywhere eventually.
I got tired of the stuff getting all over and really never gave it a chance.

I still get mites whenever I stop with the no pest strips or hosing down my plants.
I have to find the source-where they are coming from.
We have been having 30-40 degree night but I recently found mites on my Manzano.
We hardly ever get weather as cold as it's been lately and it's supposed to kill mites when it's this cold
I assume there is some place they are hibernating and come out when the days get warmer.

This season I'm getting rid of all my plants and starting over.Usually I can grow year round outside here.
Waiting on my last pods to ripen and then I'll get rid of all but a couple plants.
I'll cut them down to stems and spray the heck out of them.
If they don't die I hope I'll have gotten rid of the mites outside.
I just started some new plants a while back indoors and after using the no pest strips it seems they are either gone or are under control for now.

Good luck fighting the sob's.

If you're going to listen to anyone, Smokemaster unfortunately knows of what he speaks. Once established they're next to impossible to get rid of.

If you're lucky you catch them early and happily isolated to just one or a few plants. At this stage you can bag the plants in place, seal and toss. You may loose a few plants but this is one case where you'd gladly loose the battle to avoid having to wage a full out chemical war with odds of success against you.

I dodged a bullet a year ago. I didn't notice mites on a Bay Laurel I brought in for the winter. They quickly spread to a dozen ornamental pepper plants I had started a couple of months earlier to give as x-mas gifts. I bagged everything and tossed to the end of the driveway. A month later I moved an expendable plant to the area where the mites were and watched it closely for a few months for signs of them. As I said, I dodged a bullet. I have numerous plants in the previously infested area without any problems.

noinwi, if you're sure they're spider mite webs and not just webs left by an ordinary spider, ya gotta ask yourself how badly do you want to keep those Rocotos?

Like i said,I tried about everything.

Diazinon,Dursban,Malathion and several miticedes,neem,and all kinds of stuff that friends had in their garages.
I tried systemics that killed off the bees etc.but not the mites and a few messed up the plants worse than the mites did(rose miticide).
All only worked for up to 6 weeks max. before mites started drinking it like it was vitamins.

I think the mature mites died but the unhatched eggs became immune.

A small neutron-bomb might be overkill. Start with the least force possible and build up from there. Perhaps a healthy dose of napalm to start?

Seriously, they are the worst nightmare for growers (home thru industrial).

Bill

TREAT YOUR PLANTS LIKE THEY ARE ALREADY INFESTED.
Choose your weapon and start using it now.

Once you see a couple on your plants there are a gazillion you didn't see and your screwed.

I think I have such a bad problem is because I had so many plants I didn't know they were there until and full of mites until too late.

I was growing 2 crops a year of about 400 plants a crop.
I always had plants growing outside and sprouting inside at the same time.
Lots of places for the mites to hide out year round.

A lot of people say they got rid of mites easily indoors with soap sprays and neem every day or so.

They had a mite problem before at one time and just spray their plants out of habit.
Whether they see any bugs or not.

You can't let the mites get established in the first place.
Also some mites are supposed to be easier to get rid of than others.

Most people that have mite problems seem to be like me.

I saw yellow leaves and thaught I was doing something wrong with watering or nutes.
It was really the mites eating the green layer of the leaves.
If I'd have checked for mites right away I might not have had the problems I had and still might have...

I'd start with simple soap sprays or neem.
I wouldn't use poison until I had to.Then I'd try sulfur or no pest strips.
Why I wouldn't go all out with the poison now is you want to try and kill the mites now and not get them immune to stuff you might need to use on full grown plants to manage them after months of growing them out.

Indoor plants are usually small enough you can leave a tub of soap spray and just dunk the whole plant.
Mites take 3-5 days for the eggs to hatch.
So a dunk every 3 days should drown the hatched ones before they can lay eggs.

At least that is what I'd try before nuking everything or tossing it out.

best i have been able to do otherwise is alternating soap and neem.

On a positive note, it's been more than 48 hours since I've found and killed any spider mites in this room, and I've been looking for them pretty intently in areas where they would show up. That might just mean that they have left this room to look for my plants in the next room, but I'd prefer to believe that they have died or gone dormant.

On the downside, I guess if they have found my pepper plants in the next room, it will likely take a few weeks before the mite population builds up enough for them to be obvious. If I don't have an obvious mite infestation by mid-January, I'll start to believe that I dodged a bullet.

Pure cold-pressed Neem Oil (Dynagro makes a good one)- 1 oz per gallon of water, with 2 tsp soap (I use Murphy's Oil Soap, because I have it handy). Put it in a big garden sprayer and spray every side of the leaves, once a week. This knocks some of the mites off, and disrupts the reproductive cycle of the rest. It won't kill them, and they will never go away completely, but it will reduce their numbers enough that they won't hurt a healthy plant. This helps control aphids, too.

Good luck!

Except for my neighbor, insecticidal soap with a little Isopropyl alcohol added helped get and keep things under control.

no pest strips (if your plants are in an area where you can use them) kill mites 100%. i use them until plants start to produce flowers and then remove them from the area as i'm not real keen on eating fruit from around them.

But an update on my original situation -- a bad mite infestation on some winter squash stored in one room, which is next to my pepper growing area under lights in the next room. I asked how long mites can live without food because 10 days after I threw out the squash and anything else the mights could eat I was still finding healthy-looking mites in the squash storage room. It turns out that was the last day I found any mites crawling around. Whether that means they die after about 10 days, or just crawled away looking for greener pastures, I don't know. But the good news is that so far I don't see any indication that they found the pepper plants in the next room, and it has now been 23 days since I last found a live mite in the squash room. I'm hopeful, but I think it will be a few more weeks before I can say whether I truly dodged a bullet.

You may want to move a sacrificial plant (if you have one) into the area. If it's unscathed after a week or so you should be good to go.

Keep us posted.

Bill

Getting back to my original question about how long spider mites can live without food... it's at least 10 days because that's how long I found crawling spider mites in the squash storage room after I had thrown out anything they could eat. If it's longer than that, my gut feeling is it's not too much longer, but I don't really have evidence to back up that gut feeling. So... at least 10 days.

Is Sevin dust effective vs spider mites?

Probably.

Probably effective against humans too. Sorry, I just don't trust the big Chem/Pharma "safe" marketing claims.

JMHO,

Bill

But as pernicious as spider mites are, I'd hate to have to throw away a bunch of pepper plants if I end up having a problem...

Especially since I have a couple shaker bottles of the stuff that came with my house :P.