(no subject)
I haven't done one of these for awhile, so I am now. A massive plant post of DOOM.
First, my battle with spider mites
I am still combating the spider mites on my plants, but I think I have developed a workable plan of action. It's a radical plan, but it hasn't killed anything yet.
Spider mites, in case anyone out there doesn't know, are a type of tiny mite that infest plants and drink their blood. They are usually of the no-see-em variety, and the first hint that you have of their presence is a speckled leaf or the presence of filmy webbing. Occasionally, a particularly big and fat mite will be visible to the naked eye, trundling across the underside of a leaf.
Spider mites are insidious and evil, and can kill a plant. They feed by sucking the juice out of a single leaf cell, which collapses the cell; then they move on to do it again. This causes a speckled appearance on the leaves. Eventually the leaf dies, and eventually the plant dies. Spider mites have no predators that exist naturally in your living room. You can buy spider mite predators (these seem to be a different variety of meaner mite) but they are hella expensive and they didn't work for me.
Miticide sprays exist. One that has worked pretty well at killing the adult mites is Mite-X. It's an organic spray, which smells strongly of clove oil (which is an improvement over smelling like poison). The problem with it is that it only kills the adult mites. Mite eggs are immortal; you have to wait for them to hatch and re-spray the plant to kill the baby mites. Hopefully you can catch them before they breed again. This works on plants that don't have a lot of nooks and crannies for the mites to use to hide from the spray, as long as you are diligent about using the spray every 5 days until the mite life cycle is completed and then some (and you are careful not to kill your plant in the process - even the organic sprays are not nice stuff).
Something that worked for me on the citrus trees was neem oil. Neem oil is made from a nut ... again, it's an organic thing. I don't really subscribe to the religion of organic farming, but there's a good organic gardening center up the road from me and they have so many neat things. And the organic stuff smells so much more pleasant. Neem oil smells VERY strongly of nuts; you dilute the stuff in water with an emulsifier (a few drops of dish soap works well) and then either spray it on the tree or water the plant with it.
I did both for months, and my citrus trees SEEM to be mite-free at the moment. Neem oil disrupts the internal hormones of the mites when they molt, causing them great problems in this area and killing them when they are unable to molt properly. Spraying it directly on the trees applies it to the visible mites, while watering the plant with it will eventually cause the plant to take up some of the chemicals within the oil and incorporate them into its own structure. This makes the tree poisonous to the mites, and they essentially drink the neem oil as they feed. I also undertook my salt-the-earth policy with any leaves that showed signs of mite damage.
Oh yes. Salting the earth. I'm using the term metaphorically of course, and not actually applying salt to the soil. What I am doing is ruthlessly cutting any leaves with signs of mites from the afflicted plants and throwing them into the trash.
You may remember my beautiful anthuriums:
Well, now they look like this:
That last one is especially pitiful, isn't it?
The anthuriums got the mites somehow, and I just could not get rid of them. They had too many small crevices. I'd spray and clean and wash and think the mites were gone, and a month later I'd see them again.
It was bad enough that I was thinking seriously about euthanizing the plants, but I was very emo about this and never went through with it. As the summer wore on into fall, I started to think about bringing my trees back indoors, and how annoyed I would be if the mites somehow got back onto the trees after I worked so hard to get rid of them.
I love my anthuriums, but I don't mind saying that my citrus trees are my favorite children.
So one day I sat down with the anthuriums and a pair of scissors, and I hacked all the leaves from all four plants, then gave them a good dousing with neem oil every time I watered them. After about two months of that, I stopped with the neem oil, and instead I am inspecting them closely every time I water them. Any newborn leaf that shows webbing or speckles is sheared from the plant with extreme prejudice. This is what I call my salt-the-earth technique of mite control.
It seems to be working. The nearer anthurium in that first picture, and the far one in the second, have shown no sign of mites since the Purge. The other two had to be sheared again a couple of times; the one in the back now has two leaves that have been mite-free for about a month, although I had to cut some more mites from it last week on the other side of the plant. The fourth one, the pitiful little stumpy one, keeps showing mite damage.
Later, I discovered mites in my Armenian ivies. The mites had a stronghold in the ivy ... I hadn't really paid much attention to the ivy because it was in another room and therefore (I thought) safe from the mites. By the time I realized my mistake, the ivy was covered in webbing. D:
So I did the same thing to the ivies, and followed that up by wiping down all the stems with Mite-X, to kill and physically remove as many mites as I could. You can see the results:
The two ivies are beginning to regrow from their radical haircut. I inspected them right before I took that picture, and no sign of any mites in either of them yet.
I'm fortunate in this regard in that spider mites don't travel much. They are typically born, live and die on the same leaf. Two plants can be side-by-side for months, and as long as the leaves are not physically touching, cross-contamination is rare.
Mites also don't live very well on stems. They drink from leaves, and while I guess they COULD suck on a stem, they don't ever seem to do that. With no leaves, they have no food source, and so they flock to any young leaves that are emerging (making them easy to find/hack off).
Additionally, some of my plants seem to be resistant to the mites. I've never seen mite damage on any of my orchids, despite the orchids being directly under the badly-infested anthuriums. You'd think that some mites would FALL on the orchids, but if they do, orchid is not to their taste.
I've also never had any parasite problems in either of my peace lilies. Peace lilies are highly toxic, and maybe they are toxic to spider mites, I don't know. Or maybe I've just been lucky and the mites never got over there. My big lily had scale bugs for awhile, but it never had very many, and the ones I found were usually black and dead. Eventually they went away on their own when I rid my other plants of the scales. My theory is that the plant itself poisoned the pests.
My spider plants have never gotten mites either. Spider plants are pretty tasty to every chewing thing from grasshoppers to cats, so I don't have any idea why the mites never got involved in them. Maybe I just lucked the hell out.
So there you have it. I am conquering the mites, slowly but surely. Maybe that one anthurium will die. I hope not, but losing one is preferable to losing them all, and way preferable to having the mites get back in my citrus.
Speaking of the citrus, I moved the trees indoors for good today. I've been bringing them in off and on as it gets cooler, and today I decided that it's time for them to come indoors for the winter.
Here they are in their walled-off draft-free environment:
The arrangement is the same as I used last year - the touchy Minneola tangelo is in the far back, with the more hardy Washington navel orange up front. The lemons are in the remaining space. I've tried to keep them all from touching one another, just in case the mites invade from the other room.
You can't hardly see the tangelo way in the back, so here's a better picture of it:
No oranges this year. The unseasonable heat early in the spring made all the trees shed all their fruit. >:E
This is the Meyer lemon, the one that almost died of foot rot last winter. It seems to want to bloom the hell out of itself. I expect most, if not all, of the baby lemons to fall off. If they don't, I'll prune off all but maybe one or two. The plant is still a bit weak from its brush with death, even though it looks a million times better now.
For comparison purposes, this is what it looked like when I finally got the foot rot under control:
It's recovered so well. I'm very happy with it. :D
The Meyer lemon got munched a bit by some kind of bug early in the spring, but I've removed all the damaged leaves. Everything it has now seems to be healthy.
So that's it for the plants.
First, my battle with spider mites
I am still combating the spider mites on my plants, but I think I have developed a workable plan of action. It's a radical plan, but it hasn't killed anything yet.
Spider mites, in case anyone out there doesn't know, are a type of tiny mite that infest plants and drink their blood. They are usually of the no-see-em variety, and the first hint that you have of their presence is a speckled leaf or the presence of filmy webbing. Occasionally, a particularly big and fat mite will be visible to the naked eye, trundling across the underside of a leaf.
Spider mites are insidious and evil, and can kill a plant. They feed by sucking the juice out of a single leaf cell, which collapses the cell; then they move on to do it again. This causes a speckled appearance on the leaves. Eventually the leaf dies, and eventually the plant dies. Spider mites have no predators that exist naturally in your living room. You can buy spider mite predators (these seem to be a different variety of meaner mite) but they are hella expensive and they didn't work for me.
Miticide sprays exist. One that has worked pretty well at killing the adult mites is Mite-X. It's an organic spray, which smells strongly of clove oil (which is an improvement over smelling like poison). The problem with it is that it only kills the adult mites. Mite eggs are immortal; you have to wait for them to hatch and re-spray the plant to kill the baby mites. Hopefully you can catch them before they breed again. This works on plants that don't have a lot of nooks and crannies for the mites to use to hide from the spray, as long as you are diligent about using the spray every 5 days until the mite life cycle is completed and then some (and you are careful not to kill your plant in the process - even the organic sprays are not nice stuff).
Something that worked for me on the citrus trees was neem oil. Neem oil is made from a nut ... again, it's an organic thing. I don't really subscribe to the religion of organic farming, but there's a good organic gardening center up the road from me and they have so many neat things. And the organic stuff smells so much more pleasant. Neem oil smells VERY strongly of nuts; you dilute the stuff in water with an emulsifier (a few drops of dish soap works well) and then either spray it on the tree or water the plant with it.
I did both for months, and my citrus trees SEEM to be mite-free at the moment. Neem oil disrupts the internal hormones of the mites when they molt, causing them great problems in this area and killing them when they are unable to molt properly. Spraying it directly on the trees applies it to the visible mites, while watering the plant with it will eventually cause the plant to take up some of the chemicals within the oil and incorporate them into its own structure. This makes the tree poisonous to the mites, and they essentially drink the neem oil as they feed. I also undertook my salt-the-earth policy with any leaves that showed signs of mite damage.
Oh yes. Salting the earth. I'm using the term metaphorically of course, and not actually applying salt to the soil. What I am doing is ruthlessly cutting any leaves with signs of mites from the afflicted plants and throwing them into the trash.
You may remember my beautiful anthuriums:
Well, now they look like this:
That last one is especially pitiful, isn't it?
The anthuriums got the mites somehow, and I just could not get rid of them. They had too many small crevices. I'd spray and clean and wash and think the mites were gone, and a month later I'd see them again.
It was bad enough that I was thinking seriously about euthanizing the plants, but I was very emo about this and never went through with it. As the summer wore on into fall, I started to think about bringing my trees back indoors, and how annoyed I would be if the mites somehow got back onto the trees after I worked so hard to get rid of them.
I love my anthuriums, but I don't mind saying that my citrus trees are my favorite children.
So one day I sat down with the anthuriums and a pair of scissors, and I hacked all the leaves from all four plants, then gave them a good dousing with neem oil every time I watered them. After about two months of that, I stopped with the neem oil, and instead I am inspecting them closely every time I water them. Any newborn leaf that shows webbing or speckles is sheared from the plant with extreme prejudice. This is what I call my salt-the-earth technique of mite control.
It seems to be working. The nearer anthurium in that first picture, and the far one in the second, have shown no sign of mites since the Purge. The other two had to be sheared again a couple of times; the one in the back now has two leaves that have been mite-free for about a month, although I had to cut some more mites from it last week on the other side of the plant. The fourth one, the pitiful little stumpy one, keeps showing mite damage.
Later, I discovered mites in my Armenian ivies. The mites had a stronghold in the ivy ... I hadn't really paid much attention to the ivy because it was in another room and therefore (I thought) safe from the mites. By the time I realized my mistake, the ivy was covered in webbing. D:
So I did the same thing to the ivies, and followed that up by wiping down all the stems with Mite-X, to kill and physically remove as many mites as I could. You can see the results:
The two ivies are beginning to regrow from their radical haircut. I inspected them right before I took that picture, and no sign of any mites in either of them yet.
I'm fortunate in this regard in that spider mites don't travel much. They are typically born, live and die on the same leaf. Two plants can be side-by-side for months, and as long as the leaves are not physically touching, cross-contamination is rare.
Mites also don't live very well on stems. They drink from leaves, and while I guess they COULD suck on a stem, they don't ever seem to do that. With no leaves, they have no food source, and so they flock to any young leaves that are emerging (making them easy to find/hack off).
Additionally, some of my plants seem to be resistant to the mites. I've never seen mite damage on any of my orchids, despite the orchids being directly under the badly-infested anthuriums. You'd think that some mites would FALL on the orchids, but if they do, orchid is not to their taste.
I've also never had any parasite problems in either of my peace lilies. Peace lilies are highly toxic, and maybe they are toxic to spider mites, I don't know. Or maybe I've just been lucky and the mites never got over there. My big lily had scale bugs for awhile, but it never had very many, and the ones I found were usually black and dead. Eventually they went away on their own when I rid my other plants of the scales. My theory is that the plant itself poisoned the pests.
My spider plants have never gotten mites either. Spider plants are pretty tasty to every chewing thing from grasshoppers to cats, so I don't have any idea why the mites never got involved in them. Maybe I just lucked the hell out.
So there you have it. I am conquering the mites, slowly but surely. Maybe that one anthurium will die. I hope not, but losing one is preferable to losing them all, and way preferable to having the mites get back in my citrus.
Speaking of the citrus, I moved the trees indoors for good today. I've been bringing them in off and on as it gets cooler, and today I decided that it's time for them to come indoors for the winter.
Here they are in their walled-off draft-free environment:
The arrangement is the same as I used last year - the touchy Minneola tangelo is in the far back, with the more hardy Washington navel orange up front. The lemons are in the remaining space. I've tried to keep them all from touching one another, just in case the mites invade from the other room.
You can't hardly see the tangelo way in the back, so here's a better picture of it:
No oranges this year. The unseasonable heat early in the spring made all the trees shed all their fruit. >:E
This is the Meyer lemon, the one that almost died of foot rot last winter. It seems to want to bloom the hell out of itself. I expect most, if not all, of the baby lemons to fall off. If they don't, I'll prune off all but maybe one or two. The plant is still a bit weak from its brush with death, even though it looks a million times better now.
For comparison purposes, this is what it looked like when I finally got the foot rot under control:
It's recovered so well. I'm very happy with it. :D
The Meyer lemon got munched a bit by some kind of bug early in the spring, but I've removed all the damaged leaves. Everything it has now seems to be healthy.
So that's it for the plants.