Okay, is the next morning and there is little or no movement from the bugs. I am more worried about the Spider mites as they are to hard for me to see. I used about a tablespoon of soap in a quart spray bottle and yes, I sprayed the underside of the leaves. This morning I sprayed the plants down with the hose sprayer to get the soap and dead bugs off. I will crush and boil some chili peppers to spray for mites if I see any sign of them today. Tomorrow I use the Black flag! Dave, I did give these plants one last 1/2 strength shot of N fertilizer, 5 June, about 3/4 cup per plant. Next treatment is not until 1st of Aug. and will be 10-24-10. Also 1/2 strength. I think I just wanted one last jump in growth due to out shortened season. Now it is all about the fruit.

dan_keil_cr, In Jeff Gilman's new book "The Truth About Garden Recipes", he makes a few points about insect control, stating that garlic is more of a repellant than an insecticide that has medium term effect, say a week or two before you have to respray (unless it rains). The insects themselves will either leave your garden or go migrate to the leaves/buds/flowers you have missed. He strongly recommends that you use insecticidal soap to kill those insects you missed. Hot Chilli preparations either homemade or bought are particularly effective on mites as a repellant more so than an insecticide. He also likes the contact insecticide ingredient Acephate (not too tough on the beneficials with slight systemic activity), he does not like Imidacloprid for mites only (Bayer uses this in some insecticides) as it has been shown to actually increase the mite population, but could be used once to quickly wipe out an initial problem (some people have written it hurts bees but I have not seen proof of this). If you area is experiencing a drought it probable that all the gardens in your area are experiencing the same issues so spraying insecticides (a final resort) might only temporarily solve your problem as they will quickly return, maybe via your neighbors; thrips particularly are easily carried in the wind. One treatment might help to at least get it down to a manageable level or continued treatment with Beauvaria Bassiana fungus, if you can find it. If you can please let us know where you got it from. Thrips love drought especially plants that are drought stricken and thrips feed on mites, a veritable all you can eat buffet for them, mites and plants. One begets the other; similar to the Biblical plagues in Egypt; which in this case may be followed by diseased plants. In Whitney Crenshaw's "Garden Insects of America" he states that thrips are an important carrier of disease and are hard to remove from flowers and buds, so cutting them off when you initially spray may be a good idea. He further states that plants showing any sign of disease should be immediately destroyed. I am no expert on disease so you should discuss this with others more expert before you pull a plant. He feels sanitation of course is a key, raking leaves, etc., and that insecticides are a very weak second often being unsuccessful. Perhaps removing your current mulch and replacing it. And above all proper watering is the holy grail of control with this problem; watering washes thrips from plants and seals their pupal stages in the soil, which is why rainfall controls them. If your soil is not holding water well you might want to ask the soil experts what to do, mulch of course helps a lot. So it seems it might be solvable but will require constant vigilance and a lot of hard work spraying and making up your garlic preparations. One last note, home-made garlic preparations seem to work much better than store bought; you can buy no-skin cloves 3 lbs in a plastic jar from Costco. Store bought chilli concoctions seem to work better than home-made I do not know why. Hope this helps.

The Neem Oil should work well for mites, as well as other pest problems and to retard the spread of fungal diseases. Just be sure to thoroughly coat the undersides of the leaves. That's where the spider mites do their dirty work. I had to give up on Neem oil in the summer months because it burned my roses in our summer heat, (badly). Winter is a good time to try it out first. Some alternatives to Neem would be Avid, available from Rosemania, which is very expensive initially ($99), but lasts forever and a day. If that price makes you choke, you can also use Ortho brand sprays that indicate they kill mites. I think the cans of ready-to-use Rose Pride spray will kill mites (and it's only 5 or 6 bucks). The problem is, as Diane mentioned above, Ortho will kill off many bugs which attack mites. And spider mite populations bounce back very quickly. If you're going to use Ortho, you might try it weekly for maybe 3 weeks to try to break the mites' reproductive cycle, then stop and see if the insect populations can recover. Mites are generally only bad in warm to hot, dry weather conditions. So best not to spray year-round. It would be overkill. Maybe after you've used that miticide a few weeks, switch to blasting with water as often as you can(it's no more time-comsuming than spraying, in my opinion). If you're too busy to do it 3-4 times per week, then weekly is better than nothing. Anyway, I'm rambling. I hope the Neem oil works well for you, because I think that will do less harm to the predator population than Ortho would. Let us know how it turns out for you. Good Luck!

The article is a little misleading in its explanation. Noritake was an early (and current) firm and it did indeed incorporate some smaller companies into its structure IOW gobbled up smaller companies.......so it's correct to say a lot of early Nippon pieces may be made by Noritake or companies who later produced under Noritake, but for one thing, I doubt this plate is that old. The second being that Nippon simply means Japan in Japanese and an article marked Nippon could simply mean it was made in Japan by any one of a number of companies, and there were and still are many china manufacturers. A lot of collectors called anything marked Nippon Noritake and it surely is not. That's like calling any tissue a kleenex because Kleenex is the most well known brand. The mark in the center is going to be your definitive clue. I don't know it right off and have not time to look it up but that's what I'd be researching.