Flea beetles,leaf borers,little white flies and now spider mites?

[hl2601]

I know some of you can relate to this. So far this has been the worst pest season I have ever seen. Denver's weather has been all over the place. It is unseasonably hot now. We have had very little rain, lots of hail, and they say it is the worst mosquito outbreak and pollen season they have had in 18 years.

I would love if anyone could look at my pics and help identify the multiple things going on. Here's the thing-there are earth boxes in several areas, two different areas with large raised beds as well as some potted tomatoes. I have sprayed with garden safe, shot the leaves with water, sprayed essential oil/dawn spray,gave extra TTF...nothing is stopping the issues and in fact I feel they are increasing. I am exhausted and feel like the worst might be spider mites (which I have never had before)and I need to treat fast because things are spreading quickly in all 4 areas. I have looked at the undersides of leaves but don't see mites. I do see webbing but we have a lot of cottonwoods here and the cotton is flying like crazy. Plus, are all spiders necessarily bad?

If anyone has any time or input I would sure appreciate it. Per Bill's recipe I have ordered permethrin 10%, earth grade DE and I have Dawn waiting. Is that the best mode of attack to all these buggers? I don't want to lose the crop. I am going to send several posts with pics.

Thank you so much-
Heide

[hl2601]

More pics- those last pics were earth boxes that all had dwarves. I know the color isn't showing as yellow in some of these but in the largest raised bed the bottom sets of leaves are all yellowing quickly. Ugh.

[Salsacharley]

It looks to me that most of your problem is hail damage. Hail shreds, punctures, tears, crushes...etc. and a lot of the wounds look like dried or dead spots. Since you are in Denver you are probably well aware of what hail does so I don't mean to be presumptuous.

[hl2601]

Thanks for your quick reply Charley! No answer is presumptuous. I already removed the hail damage-this shredding and cutting of leaves is newer. I am trying to upload more photos so you can see more.

[hl2601]

more pics including the lower yellowing of leaves- I keep pruning disease off every day.

[hl2601]

Thanks for your patience-I wanted to provide as many pics as I could that may give you info. There is a cucumber here with the aforementioned webbing which appears to be flying cotton, although I do see webs in the mulch when I water so spiders are there. Mites too?

[Cheryl2017]

Doesn't look like the spider mite damage that I get. Looks like fertilizer burn with maybe a few opportunistic insect bites

[peebee]

I really can't see spider mite damage either. Don't assume when you see webbing, that it is from spider mites, unless it is very very fine webbing, almost microscopic; it might just be regular spiders. I have lots of spiders this year, I'm letting them be, on the off chance that their webs might deter the mites from moving in somehow.
Once you see a mite-damaged leaf, you will know. The green leaves look somehow as if they are pin-pointed with light dots all over, and the back of the leaves will feel grainy and you can see "dust" at first but on closer inspection they are the dreaded spider mites. If you go out at night with a flashlight, you can actually see the tiny buggers moving around. Google images so you can familiarize yourself with what the damage would look like.
I think your plants will be just fine, give them time to recover.

[zipcode]

In your second post, last picture, there is something resembling spider mite damage.
The only one that can know for sure is you, just look on the underside of the leaves of that plant. I guess it depends how good our eyes are. I can easily see mature spider mites without looking too closely, but some people need a magnifier.

[bower]

I always forget to do the paper test but it's a good one! Tap your suspect leaf onto a sheet of white paper. If the specks on the paper crawl around, they are mites.

BTW your plants look quite good to me and not severely affected by the damage to leaves, whatever the cause. They look strong, not sad. We don't really get hail here but my first thought would have been environmental causes of that type. The beetles in one of your pics could be doing some chomping too. If I were you I'd try to get a species ID on the beetles, maybe get some clearer pics for that. The antenna (among other things) are important for ID to general groups of plant eaters vs insect eaters.
The "webbing " in your last pics doesn't look anything like spider mites, looks like a stray fluffy seed of some kind or maybe a cocoon in progress. Spider mite webs are super fine, and their damage is not like those big chompings on the leaves at all.

To the other question, are all spiders bad? Not at all. Spiders are your friend, and some of them will eat the mites too. Sometimes all a garden needs is time for the good insects to catch up with the bad. Spraying with water, or shaking the plants to knock those beetles off for a week or two may be enough time for the predators to catch up with them (But caveat that notion is not based on a specific knowledge of beetle as a pest, and some beetles are the good guys, I can't positively ID the one in your photo just assuming a pest due to the relative size of the damage/chomps). OTOH if you spray permethrin or a lot of DE you will kill as many or more beneficials as you do pests. If the beetles are climbers you could use DE around the lower stem to keep them down, the less you use, the less you risk your natural controls.

[hl2601]

Bower that is a great suggestion I will do that tomorrow morning. Thanks to everyone who replied. The beetle has been confirmed as flea beetle. It looks like there is some tunneling on leaves that a leaf borer may do. I am going to inspect early and if there are pics to post for confirmation from the TVille folks I will post.

Thx again for helping me everyone!
Heide

[b54red]

I agree with some of the earlier replies that it doesn't look like spider mites. However flea beetles could be causing some damage and Permethrin will quickly get rid of them at least for a few weeks. They are quite easy to kill but they can multiply fast. They seem to affect most of my veggies early in the year but I only spray them when they get bad.

Bill

[peebee]

I used to kill flea beetles with my bare hands--just slowly turned over the leaves, and before they had time to jump I would just squash them with my fingers. After doing this daily for a couple of weeks they were gone. I almost miss them now, they were so easy to control but now I have spider mites in their place and they are not fun.

[bower]

If you see leaf miner tunnels, it's a good idea to pick off those leaves and burn them or trash them out of the garden. The life cycle of miners I know, when they're done feeding on the leaves they drop to the soil for the next stage and then emerge as flies to lay eggs on your leaves again. So when you see tunnels is a handy time to intervene and remove, to prevent them multiplying.

I don't know much about flea beetles but I have seen really bad damage on brassica crops under row cover at the farm, where the beetles were present before planting. Rotation and removing crop wastes end of season is how we avoid those losses at the farm.

Funny about the two week/couple week cycle people mentioned - I have another pest in my garden that is "spit bugs", that shows up like clockwork every year on the perennials. So what I used to do is once they appeared I would hose them off the plants every day or two for, yep, two weeks, and then they stopped coming back and troubled no more for the season. I haven't bothered with that for many years letting the perennials go without any watering, and they do occasionally cause some damage, worst is chewing through the stem below the flowers, but they seem to have a limited window for damaging whether I hose them or not. Maybe it's just the beneficials catch up with them in a couple weeks, regardless. There are so many diverse insects in my garden, I have no idea what they're all doing. I know there are numerous kinds of parasitoid wasps though. The parasitoids lay their eggs in the pest, and it takes a couple weeks afaik to hatch out a brood and get some serious pest control action by the numbers. So there is a natural lag time between OMG I have a pest and, hey there's no more damage to write home about. But mechanical controls like shaking or hosing or hand picking do help to get through that waiting period...
If only the "insects eat their own pests" worked for slugs, I'd be laughin. But they are helping to feed the birds I guess....

[hl2601]

The paper test was a great suggestion and brought some culprits out. As I said, I have different issues in four different areas. Confirmed flea beetles and leaf miners so I won't include those pics. A question-the plants with leaf miners are in new earth boxes. To treat they say spray the soil so the larva don't mature. How do I do that? I have the spinosad so I will do the leaves tonight.

Here are some other culprits. What I thought were spider mites possibly seem to be longer and thinner than the pics of mites I have seen-I wonder what you all think? Are these thrips?

I think the green bug is an aphid. I think possibly there are the small flying aphids stuck to several stems and leaf tops. They are really tiny. They don't seem to be causing damage, but will they if I don't treat since there are so many other things going on?

Last picture, this is the area that has the leaf miners, the damage is not yet too severe but I did find some of the stems have some white spots and saw these stem cankers/punctures. Ideas?
Thank you!!