The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Maybe Dreams Do Come True

New buds

I walk out to my garden every morning hoping the Tomato Russet Mite was a bad dream and my tomato plants didn’t shrivel up into papery brown shambles.

No such luck.

Every day, I venture out to the scene of the microscopic bug’s carnage, and reality slaps me in the face.

I don’t know why I do it. Sometimes I look for tomatoes that haven’t been affected by the mites—and sometimes I even find one or two.

Today I finally gave up on my masochistic trips to the garden. I started to pull out the tomato plants that were completely dead.

Then, as I got to the plants that still had some green on them, I noticed that there are green vines growing out from in between the dead vines. At the end of some of these vines is new fruit that is ripening.

Hmmm. Maybe my dream is coming true.

new fruit

One Way To Kill The Evil Tomato Russet Mites

The path to Markene's veggie garden.
I love making up my own home remedies. It makes me feel smart, even if they don’t work. There is just something seemingly scientific about pouring one liquid into a bottle and then pouring another on top and mixing it with something else, oooh it’s so, so, Frankenstein-y.

Well, my friend Markene commented on my last post that she had a home remedy for the dreaded Tomato Russet Mites.

She told me that her solution is actually a squash bug treatment and that she usually uses it to treat her squash plants. In my post, I neglected to add that the Tomato Russet Mites have devastated my squash plants as well.

I only have two squashes in my entire garden—and their days are probably numbered.
 
This is Markene’s recipe for squash and tomato mite death:
 
She says to soak garlic in mineral oil overnight, then add Seventh Generation laundry soap, and water. She sprays early morning or late afternoon, to avoid angering the bees.

She mixes up a new batch and douses the squash blossoms and tomato leaves a couple of times each week.

When the garlic solution clogs up her drugstore spray-bottle nozzle, she removes the sprayer nozzle and pours the garlic/mineral oil/soap and water mixture directly on leaves and buds that look salvageable.

She continually prunes away any dead, brown leaves and buds. Not wanting to breed new generations of evil bugs she disposes of infested foliage into the garbage, not the compost pile or yard waste bin.

If the plant is entirely brown, she removes the whole thing, including any brown leaves it may have dropped, so it doesn't infect neighboring plants.

Markene's fabulous veggie garden.
It’s a lot of work. But anything to kill the evil, dreaded Tomato Russet Mites.

Tomato Russet Mites

There has been a lot of talk about the Tomato Russet Mite this year. Why? Because the murdering little %$#&# s have been out of control killing tomato plants all over the place.

It all starts out innocently enough. A brown leaf here, a wilting branch there. When my husband first saw signs of it, he did what he usually does and blamed me. “See, I told you that you weren’t watering enough.”


I had just put in a drip system to make our lives a little less complicated, and there he was, my husband, day after day, watering by hand on top of the irrigation the tomatoes had already gotten, muttering under his breath what a loser gardener I was.

Much to his dismay the leaves were turning browner and browner and the plants were withering away. My husband kept watering even after I received the email from Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farms about TRM.


You can’t see Tomato mites with the naked eye; you need a 14x lens to see them. They suck the life out of your plants starting at the ground up, leaving the leaves and stems brown and curly, and eventually killing the whole plant. They have already done damage by the time they are discovered, but there are ways to control them.

You can treat the infested plant with mined sulfur dust. Cynthia suggests using Azatrol, a miticide. She says that Azatrol acts faster than the sulfur dust.


I’m pretty sure that the first garden the mites infiltrated was mine. The message through the grapevine was that I was a lazy gardener. The Tomato Russet Mites knew that if they set up shop in my garden, I would just let them stay there. I might occasionally curse at them and in turn my husband would curse at me, but I have too much going on to find the time to actually kill them, so there they stay, quietly killing my tomatoes. 

And here I am collecting as many tomatoes as I can before they wither and fall off the vines.

Oh well, there’s always next year.