Spider Mites

These tiny little buggers, red and barely visible, my plants been suffered from spider mites and I only found out after a couple of years.

Beans

They are on my beans, ransacking my green bean leaves and have killed several bean plants.  They turn waxy bean leaves into coarse surface like sand paper, dry and torn easily if completely sucked dry.

spider mites damages on green bean leaves, completely sucked/dotted in June, 2017

spider mites damages on topside of
 yardlong bean leave in June, 2017

spider mites damages on underside of
 yardlong bean leave in June, 2017

A couple of years ago, I had seen the dotted/yellowing, but I thought it was some other issues, I never cared about the issue because the beans were still producing, but not as I recalled, the production seemed to drop after some time.  This year, I began to finally notice some beans were dying out.

When the mites suck out a leave, it's done, that leaf can not perform photosynthesis anymore and when all leaves are sucked dried, the plant is going to die.

But before that, I have noticed the stunted growth, new seedling stop growing and established ones slowing down the growth, I saw the tip of vine was not growing as fast as it used to be.

Celery

Spider Mites damages on Celery

I have one celery, which was planted early this year from stump. it was growing nicely at late winter and early spring, a lot of big green stalks.

Then the grown stunted and leaves turned yellow, but it does have two flower stalks, although they are about only 15­–20cm, really too short.

Around April or May, it was already bolting, but somehow the flower stalk rotting, so I cut it off, and the celery still surviving, now with two stalks.  I don't know if the cause of dwarfing is by the mites, or the rotting in the plant.

Cut all leaves off

Nonetheless, all leaves are sucked, they looked so ugly yellowish, not much hope for it to grow if spider mites keep sucking it dry.

I didn't see any mites on the flowers, but they are tiny, I might have missed.  Anyway, I decided to cut all leaves off, hopefully spider mites wouldn't come back before new shoots coming up, but that's really unlikely since the mites still on bean leaves.

Chinese Spinach (Amaranthus dubius, 莧菜 in Chinese)

Cilantro

I had sowed some seedings, but as soon as the first true leaf coming out, the mites found it, and it slowly going to die.

Snapdragons

Unlike others like bean leaves, snapdragon leaves didn't seem to have dotted sign, but plainly yellowing and curling leaves.

Sunflowers

On leaves and flowers, they love the yellow petals and webbing on sepals.  The webbing was the first time I finally recognized the mites problem.

Water Spinach (Ipomoea aquatica, 空心菜 in Chinese)