Spider Mite Baths - How long

[Darkhorse]

Hey Charlie,


   How long after treatment for spider mites have you seen plants show symptoms?  The Island Girl that got "the Cindy dunk" on Fri nite is just now starting to show a few mottled spots on leaves.  The plant was submurged in water about 111 degrees for about 12 min.  Shouldn't this have gotten everything?

Worried!  Some of my other cvs are still developing new yellow leaves too.  

Thanks!

[Cindy]

Hi Jordan,

First, use cooler water from now on. My last bath with about 90 degree water for an hour was the gentlest spider mite treatment ever for my hibiscus. The Presidential Affair I dunked didn't lose a single leaf afterward, and it only lost one bud out of about 8. The rest of the buds are growing, developing color, and getting ready to bloom! So I'm revising the spider mite protocol. The high temp eats away the waxy coating of the leaves and damages them. The cooler temp protects the leaves, but still drowns all bugs. It got aphids as well as spider mites, and who knows what else. The poor plant was in bad shape!  But now it's clean and sparkly with no damage.

But no matter how gentle the treatment, if spider mites have damaged leaves before you treat, those leaves will still have to fall off. It takes a few days for the damage to kill the leaf, make the yellow mottling show, and make the leaf fall off. So it may just be spider mite damage your leaves are showing, Jordan, from before the treatment.

What I'm doing now is bathing my plants once or twice a year, when they look like they don't need it! I'm not waiting to see spider mite damage. I'm bathing proactively, and it's working really well. Plus, every time I bring a new plant into the house, even from Charlie's greenhouse that he swears is squeaky clean, I bathe it before I let it go near my other plants. Something about the warm dry indoor environment makes a single dormant egg explode into a full spider mite infestation, in a way the humid greenhouse or breezy garden would never do! So the cleanest looking plant still gets a bath before it comes in my house.  This way I only have to bathe them all twice a year at the most. 

One treatment definitely would have killed your bugs though, Jordan. So just let the plant recover. Drowning is the most sure way to kill those obnoxious little mites, and it gets every weird kind of African Violet mite, cyclamen mite, invisible microscopic mite that hangs around on houseplants.

Did you bath all your plants at once?  If not, put them all in the bathtub together with lukewarm water for at least half an hour. Make sure you get every plant, clean the shelves they sit on, then you're done for months. It does work!

Cindy

[Darkhorse]

Ok, I feel better now.  I couldn't get all my cvs at once (30 something in one tub... yikes!!)  but the washed plants have been quarantined in my house and I'm not touching them or the 7 or 8 I still have to wash.  I can't do that though, until the plumbers finish unclogging my bathtub!  (seriously, they're here right now)  Anyway, this spider mite saga has been long and drawn out, and I'm thinking of starting a spider mites for dummies thread of choices not to make (i.e. not getting the big soil chunks out of the tub before draining...)

I will do the cooler water/longer time bath from now on.  Only 7 more plants to go!

Thanks, as always, for all the great information!!

[Nievesgirl]

I am about to does this tonight when I get home I still see damage but I am Paranoid so I will bathe my plants.