Re: spider mites was: Gardener's dance routines - Free LEWISIA

Dot,

In my experience, spider mites revel in dry, hot conditions so one of the
ways to fight them is to make sure your plants are not drought stressed. 
You can hose them off with a sharp spray of water and you can use
insecticidal soap to good effect.  Safer's Insecticidal Soap is available
at many garden centers and through mail order from most garden supply
houses.  It is a proven remedy with no residual effects and is not harmful
to people.  It is a contact insecticide.

Plants can stand a certain amount of insect predation with no major damage
- they do it all the time.  But, an influx of a certain pest can indicate
things about how your plants are doing.  Stressed plants are more
vulnerable to massive insect attack than happy ones.

I would be pretty chary about using heavy duty insecticides like Sevin on a
food crop like tomatoes. In fact this web site (which has detailed
information about spider mites and dealing with them) says that Sevin can
actually cause mite populations to increase due to killing off all their
natural predators.  You might want to take a look at the site...

http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn006.html

Practicing IPM (Integrated Pest Management) is generally most effective
against insect pests in the long run because it permits the natural balance
of pest and predator to occur.  It is quite possible that you are
increasing the pest population by trying to poison it off because you are
also killing all predator insects....for more information about IPM, take a
look at the National IPM Network site:

http://www.reeusda.gov/agsys/nipmn/index.htm

IPM is not an instant cure, but then, developing a healthy ecosystem in
your garden takes some time to do.  However, once you have a good balance,
you will find that you can generally control things with observation, sharp
sprays of water, insecticidal soap, horticultural oil sprays, BT,
biological controls and other rather benign methods.  Key is the health of
your plants, knowing the life cycles of the pests in your area and who
their natural predators are.

There is no quick fix; no poison you can spray on your soil that will
eliminate insect pests from your garden.   Insects will always be with us. 
And, particularly with food crops, what you put on your crops also goes
into your stomach, so you might want to learn which chemicals have what
kind of residual effects, etc....just a thought.

I would also be very careful using tobacco solution remedies, as tobacco is
one of the most lethal poisons on the planet in liquid form....Jerry Baker
is irresponsible in his advocacy of this treatment, especially since I once
read, in one of his flyers, that he suggested storing the solution in empty
soda cans.  I was appalled....it would be so easy for a child to get their
hands on it and drink it and that would mean death.  His homebrew formulas
sound like inexpensive solutions, but if you stop and figure out what the
ingredients actually cost, they turn out to be rather expensive used in the
garden and totally scientifically unproved as effective.  Unfortunately,
his "master gardener" title is self given and his marketing abilities
exceed his horticultural abilities.

Marge Talt, zone 7 Maryland
mtalt@clark.net
Editor:  Gardening in Shade
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----------
> From: dot <cdpierce@intop.net>
> To: perennials@mallorn.com
> Subject: Re: Gardener's dance routines - Free LEWISIA
> Date: Friday, May 28, 1999 2:25 PM
> 
> HELP HELP!!!!! Can anyone tell me what to use to kill spider mites on
> tomatoes?have sprayed them with liquid sevin,didn't work,they have fruit
on
> them the size of a baseball,but still full of blooms,what can i use that
> won't kill the blooms, but get rid of the mites?
> Dot zone7 NE Ms.
> 
> 
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