Spider mites are tiny, tiny things.

Their webs are tiny things, too. I don't think that they would pull leaves together.

The mites probably don't eat much other than what they suck out of plants. Most of the time, there's no noticeable webs.

To see a spider mite on the underside of a leaf, focus on a dot and wait to see if it moves. If it doesn't, focus on another dot. Look at it steadily for at least a minute. Maybe after staring at, say, 3 dots without detecting movement you can rule out spider mites. After about a week, you can stare at dots all over again!

I think if you are concerned about the health of these plants, you should set them out on the lawn and spray, spray, spray them with the water hose. And, by the way, hot dry weather and spider mites go together real, real good . . . or is it, real, real bad?!?

Steve

Hi Toad,

By the time spider mites produce enough webs to see them, you would normally have yellowing, browning, dead, or dying leaves! And spider mites are almost always concentrated most heavily on the new (most tender) growth. Spider mites, BTW, if you look at them with a loupe, DO look like microscopic spidersbut theyÂre not! And, as Digit already said, I canÂt imagine spider mites ever actually "pulling" a leaf together in any way. If your leaves still look green and normal, except for the distortion and the webs, I doubt that itÂs mites!

Can you post a picture?

Have you pulled apart one of the leaves thatÂs "pulled together" to see whatÂs inside? That might answer your question right there.

If itÂs just some kind of an "ordinary" spider, I doubt that youÂd have them all over the place!

Curious! I hope you can post some closeup pictures to possibly help catch the culprit!

Skybird

Thanks for the replies! I took away the webs on one plant but have them on my asters also. I have not figured out how to post pics but if Skybird would send me his email, I will send pics. If the webs are spiders', is that normal to have many around the yard on plants?

Hi Toad,

Skybird will send you HER email address so you can send the pics! Maybe I can help you figure out how to post them.

If it's "real" spiders, I've sure never seen them "all over the place" like you're describing! On the other hand, it definitely IS possible to have mites all over the place, but I just can't imagine mites "pulling" the leaves together---unless the leaves are just curling up by themselves because they're dying! Are they still green and normal looking except for the "webs?"

I'll send you a short email,
Skybird

Hi Toad,

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you! I've been really busy!

I just sent you an email, and Im gonna reply here to so others can see the pics and join in with their analysis of what the problem(s) is/are!

I got your pictures, and I think you have different things going on there. The first pics are tomatoes, aren't they? That looks like real spider web to me, and unless those are the only "curled up" leaves, the webs might not have anything to do with the problem. If the whole plant is looking kind of curly and sick, you could have one of the tomato maladies! If the whole plant looks bad, post a picture on RMG in a new thread asking about tomatoes! Igratefullydon't really know what's what with all those diseases! If it's only those couple leaves that look curly, cut them off and clean up all the webs, and you should be fine!

The morning glory looks like either earwigs or grasshoppers to me. Normally I'd say most likely earwigs, but I've had way more than the usual number of grasshoppers this year, and the damage they each do looks the same. And just ONE grasshopper can eat a LOT in just a couple hours! Look under rocks or boards or in any cracks or crevasses for earwigs, or saturate a thick (fairly big) piece of newspaper and lay it at the base of the plants in the evening, and then go out first thing in the morning and pick it up to see what you can see! If it's earwigs, I use Ortho (Bug B Gon) Max Insect Killer (bifenthrin). It's a granular made mostly to spread on lawns to kill insects that are doing damage. I sprinkle a little bit wherever I'm having a problem, and then you water it in. I've had a lot of earwigs get in the house this year (my family room is "garden level!"), and I sprinkled some in the mulch around the perennials next to the foundation on the north side a month ago, and it's helped a lot. If its grasshoppers, you just need to kind of watch for them! I keep a can of ant & roach spray handy, and just directly spray any I find---and it kills them VERY quickly! Grasshoppers survive winter and get bigger every year, so if you find any, you really should get rid of them while they're still "reasonably" small! The bigger they get, the harder they are to kill---and, the more they EATand the more they procreate!!! One other possibility on the morning glories---but don't think this is what it is---would be slugs. I don't see any "slime trails" in your pics, but if you can ever see any "shiny lines" on the leaves, then it's slugs! Slug bait is the only way I know of to get rid of slugs! (I don't know of any "effective" way to get rid of any of those things without using some insecticides! You could manually catch the grasshoppers and then "dispose" of themat Paulinos we used to catch them and FLING them into the pond and watch the koi chow down!but grasshoppers can be HARD to catch!

And the honeysuckle bush just looks like a very old spider web that debris has blown into to me! Put on a pair of gloves and pull the debris apart to see if you see any caterpillars or anything inside, and if you don't, just clean up the mess and the webs and cut off any branches or foliage that looks bad. I'm not really seeing any insect damage at all on the plant itself.

[Cleaning up your spider webs won't hurt the spiders! They'll just move somewhere else! And the honeysuckle webs look LONG deserted to me anyway! So does the "tomato web."]

Does anybody else have any other helpful advice?

Skybird

Okay Skybird, are you paying me back for the wheat thread?

That linked page is completely blank for me.

Steve

OMG! What's going on here? It comes up as a slide show of 5 pictures for me! I checked it before I posted it, and I just checked it again! So, whazup with this? Can anybody else see the pictures? This is the first time we've ever had a problem like this on RMG!

And, if you posted 47 (I don't believe you!) pics on the Wheat thread, I wanna see them ALL! Seriously, I can now see FOUR pictures on that thread--including the cukes and 777 that you posted recently!

So, what's going on here?

Can anybody else see Matoad's pictures that I linked at the bottom of my last post???

Skybird

Nope :( I can't see them either.

I don't see anything but a blank page :(

Just an FYI for everybody! I could see the link I posted the day I posted it, but since I turned my computer off overnite and turned it back on the next day, I just get the same blank page the rest of you are getting! So apparently as long as it was in my "active memory" [real computer geek here!] I could pull it up again, but when I shut the computer down it cleared my cache and my history, and it disappeared for me too! I'm sure there's some way for Matoad to post a link from Kodak Gallery, but I don't know anything about it, so I don't know how to tell her to do it! And I've tried absolutely everything I can think of to copy her pics from Kodak into Picasa so I could post them myself, and as near as I can tell, that's not possible.

Sorry about that!

Skybird