These are a real sweetie. Last summer (my first of real gardening) I had most of my plants in pots still waiting for the new garden to be prepared. Horror of horrors I found a few of them covered in very fine webs with lots of little .... well red spider mites running round them sucking out my precious plants' natural precious planty type fluids. Although I had no idea how to deal with them (and nor did my local nursery) I got a commercial bug killer and sprayed them in the open air. Now my greenhouse is not going up until this summer so I had to bring some of my tender young babies into the house to over-winter. They are due to go back out in about 6-8 weeks BUT this morning, on my aloe vera, fine webs and tiny red spiders. And that is even though they have been in the house since early November. I assume that the larvae have been in the compost since then and are just breaking free. Anyone got any method of dealing with these tiny terrors? I lost 4 plants to them last year.

Webwise--just found your post. I did a little looking around and found a site that might be helpful. It offers 5 options for treating red spider mites. The site is:

http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2012.html

Hope this helps.

Thanks very much MLN. I Googled 'spider mites' but very little showed. I've just realised I used google.co.uk instead of .com so many US sites will not show. And to think I used to be a web consultant -LOL. This site is very useful and one of it's methods should work. Just hope they didn't get too strong a hold last year.

No problem Webwise--that's what we're here for