How long can spider mites live without plants

Choosing a Home for Your New Houseplant

October 26, 2022 No Comments

Read More

I googled the subject of this post and the hits were mostly pot-growing forums where spider mites are apparently quite a problem for indoor cultivation. There was a mix of opinions, so I thought I'd see what people here thought.

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?

Don"t wait to see if you have mites.

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.

I first got mites indoors 3 seasons ago.
The only thing that seems to somewhat work is Hot Shot no pest strips to control them.

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.

Uuuuggg, I wouldn't wish spider mites on anyone - OK maybe a few politicians ;-))

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?

"ya gotta ask yourself how badly do you want to keep those Rocotos?"
Pretty badly, Ott, and yes, it's mites(sigh). Some control is all I can hope for. My two plants are small enough(in 8" pots)that I put them in the sink and thoroughly soaked them with the Safer soap. I'll do that every few days and see how it goes. If things don't improve I'll switch to the sulfur fungicide. They are my only plants aside from a few houseplants spread out around the apartment(can't isolate...have cats). The growing season here is so short that I'd like to keep them alive if I can. Otherwise I'd have to start more from seed(and I don't have much room to do that)in a couple of months anyway just to get a dozen pods by the end of the season(I think I got about 8 usable pods from these two plants this season). Either way I'll be frettin' & fussin' for most of the winter.
The environment is working against me,too. It's so dry here right now that we have a humidifier and a water kettle going constantly and you still can't touch anything without getting zapped. But I'm sure the mites are loving it.

I
have a great idea for you guys and it works every time it even kills
termites, wood boring beetles, on and on. Heat the room to 130 F for
several hours. All protein cooks at a little over 120 F everything
that is in there will be dead after 2 hours. If you are going for
something inside the walls like termites it will of course take
longer but pretty much everything dies. Now if the termites are
coming up from the ground where they have a queen type colony going
it will take successive heating but eventually they will die too
through starvation.

This
is a great system and I have used it on entire houses. No chemicals,
no tenting, and they are out of there every time. One of the things
I had to do on large houses was place oven heaters in the window that
I could see from the outside to monitor my progress but it always
worked. One thing you might want to think about is if you have a
large area you can rent a big propane heater that they use to speed
up the mud drying on plaster board jobs.

You
can leave the furniture in the house most of the time but then you
might want to make sure that the paint doesn't bubble.

It makes sense that since spider mites are in the arachnid family, they are tougher to get rid of...pesticides for most insects don't work on spiders. I did want to comment on a previous statement (jennq) that once you have them you will always have them...not true! I had a room full of houseplants of all kinds, and they (unfortunately) attacked my "maryjane" plant, which was in the center stage (they were all on the same table) with a vengence. I had been away for a few days and came home to the cannabis in a tent web...covered. I took it outside and disposed of it. That was four years ago and I never had another spider mite. So...yesterday my partner finds a huge majesty palm tree at Lowe's for $5. He brought it home and it was completely covered in webbing and mites (he isn't experienced at looking closely). I probably should have tossed it, but I cut off all but one inner leaf, stripped it of all soil and gave it an underwater soapy neem bath, then gave it a hand sanitizer rub, then repotted and have it in my bathroom for a few weeks. Of course, my anxiety over my other plants getting mites may outweigh my dysfunctional rescue urge here. I wonder if anyone has EVER successfully cleared a plant of spider mites...? I understand plants are more susceptible to these critters when the plant is stressed with watering issues (consistancy helps), but this opens me up to a ton of other questions...

How long can mites live without plants?

Can spider mites go dormant?

How long can spider mites live in an empty room?

Can spider mites live in soil?