How to Kill Red Mites

Mites can easily infest and kill a number of plants.

Red spider mites may seem like they should be easy to spot crawling around on your houseplants or the trees in your garden, but they are far from obvious. Spider mites can be as small as the period on the end of a sentence, allowing them to blend in easily with leaves and flowers. These red, green or white insects may be small, but they can be devastating to a garden, killing shrubs and trees and reproducing quickly. Killing these mites can save your plants from damage.

Things You'll Need

• Plastic covering
• Water
• Spray bottle
• Miticide or miticide soap

Instructions

1. Move infested plants away from healthy plants as soon as you see signs of an infestation to prevent the spread of mites. If you cannot separate infected plants, cover surrounding plants with protective plastic or other bags to stop the infestation from spreading.

2. Spray infested plants with water from a spray bottle. Spray upwards from the bottom of the plant against the bottom side of the leaves where mites commonly live. Repeat every other day for a week. If the infestation continues, you need more powerful mite-killing products.

3. Apply miticide or miticidal soap to the infested plant. Thoroughly soak each leaf in the soap with the spray bottle, or dunk container plants fully into the soap solution for complete coverage.

4. Wait five days and repeat this treatment. Miticides will not kill mite eggs or molting mites, so you must reapply to ensure that you kill all the mites. Apply three treatments (with five days between each treatment) to ensure that you have destroyed the mite infestation.

Tips & Warnings

• Find miticides and other treatment materials at garden centers and nurseries.

• If you cannot bring a mite infestation under control, contact an expert at a garden center, nursery or agricultural extension service for help. These professionals often have stronger chemicals that can kill mites more effectively.

• Some pesticides and miticides can seriously injure certain types of plants and trees. Before treating the whole plant, test your product on one or two of the leaves of the plant that are already damaged or are not necessary to life of the plant.

References

• Evergreen Garden Works: Spider Mites
• University of Kentucky: Spider Mites on Landscape Plants
• Bonsai Garden: Red Spider Mites