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If you need help identifying a pepper, disease, or plant issue, please post in Identification.
Leaves curled/clawed - need help identifying problem
- Thread starter ChilliK
- Start date
OP,
Where are you located at?
Where are you located at?
suchen said:
What in your guys opinion is the best approach to eradicate mites? Should you just destroy the plants?
Wow, so many responses! We live in Queensland in Australia. If it helps with identifying things, we're up on the second floor of an apartment block, with our plants all in pots on the balcony. We have a bunch of different herbs, an avocado plant and three anaheim chilli plants, two of which are huge and producing chillies 
Just to clarify - there's two types of bugs that I've seen. There's the larger, whitish clear ones (still less than a mm big) that are on our two large chilli plants, which is where I found the fine strands in some of the upper branches, and are the subjects of my initial posts. They move really quickly when disturbed. I haven't been hunting them down recently, just keeping an eye on them, as they don't seem to be multiplying out of hand.
The other ones, that are actually like moving specs of dust (really, really small, would not be able to get a video of them, could only see them when shining a torch on the leaves) I've found on the third, small, stunted chilli plant that I just uploaded photos of yesterday. These specs are obviously harming the plant. There's no strands on the stunted plant that I can see, and I can't imagine spider mites being that small (watched videos of them on youtube).
If neem doesn't work for these things, what's the best option? Although the stunted plant is probably never going to produce fruit I'd still prefer to use something that's food safe as there's a bunch of edible things around it
Just to clarify - there's two types of bugs that I've seen. There's the larger, whitish clear ones (still less than a mm big) that are on our two large chilli plants, which is where I found the fine strands in some of the upper branches, and are the subjects of my initial posts. They move really quickly when disturbed. I haven't been hunting them down recently, just keeping an eye on them, as they don't seem to be multiplying out of hand.
The other ones, that are actually like moving specs of dust (really, really small, would not be able to get a video of them, could only see them when shining a torch on the leaves) I've found on the third, small, stunted chilli plant that I just uploaded photos of yesterday. These specs are obviously harming the plant. There's no strands on the stunted plant that I can see, and I can't imagine spider mites being that small (watched videos of them on youtube).
If neem doesn't work for these things, what's the best option? Although the stunted plant is probably never going to produce fruit I'd still prefer to use something that's food safe as there's a bunch of edible things around it
Bro, those are mites of some type. The ones I had last year were tomatoe russet mites. I never seen them with my 12x loop. It took the pathology lab to diagnose it for me. I was asking where you live, because the lab here in California does it free within a couple days, but you are in Australia, so scratch that. My plants had similar symptoms like yours: reddish dust on the mereistems spindly twisted crinkly leaves, bronzing, defoliation, brittle leaves, etc.
if you want to try to cure your plants, you will need the most powerful pesticide or the only way which is organic is sulfur dust. I used the micronized sulfur dust successfully. I have 70 plants right now that have no mites.
Your gonna have to be VERY thorough with the sulfur.
if you want to try to cure your plants, you will need the most powerful pesticide or the only way which is organic is sulfur dust. I used the micronized sulfur dust successfully. I have 70 plants right now that have no mites.
Your gonna have to be VERY thorough with the sulfur.
Another idea is to turn some predatory mites loose on the pest mites. Like this one:
http://www.bugsforbugs.com.au/californicus/
The description says these guys can eat pollen as well as eating other mites, so I would probably put some kind of flowers close to the peppers and hope for a permanent population of the predators.
http://www.bugsforbugs.com.au/californicus/
The description says these guys can eat pollen as well as eating other mites, so I would probably put some kind of flowers close to the peppers and hope for a permanent population of the predators.