You might want to go here for your ID's

Hi Toad, Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you! I've been really busy! I just sent you an email, and Im gonna reply here to so others can see the pics and join in with their analysis of what the problem(s) is/are! I got your pictures, and I think you have different things going on there. The first pics are tomatoes, aren't they? That looks like real spider web to me, and unless those are the only "curled up" leaves, the webs might not have anything to do with the problem. If the whole plant is looking kind of curly and sick, you could have one of the tomato maladies! If the whole plant looks bad, post a picture on RMG in a new thread asking about tomatoes! Igratefullydon't really know what's what with all those diseases! If it's only those couple leaves that look curly, cut them off and clean up all the webs, and you should be fine! The morning glory looks like either earwigs or grasshoppers to me. Normally I'd say most likely earwigs, but I've had way more than the usual number of grasshoppers this year, and the damage they each do looks the same. And just ONE grasshopper can eat a LOT in just a couple hours! Look under rocks or boards or in any cracks or crevasses for earwigs, or saturate a thick (fairly big) piece of newspaper and lay it at the base of the plants in the evening, and then go out first thing in the morning and pick it up to see what you can see! If it's earwigs, I use Ortho (Bug B Gon) Max Insect Killer (bifenthrin). It's a granular made mostly to spread on lawns to kill insects that are doing damage. I sprinkle a little bit wherever I'm having a problem, and then you water it in. I've had a lot of earwigs get in the house this year (my family room is "garden level!"), and I sprinkled some in the mulch around the perennials next to the foundation on the north side a month ago, and it's helped a lot. If its grasshoppers, you just need to kind of watch for them! I keep a can of ant & roach spray handy, and just directly spray any I find---and it kills them VERY quickly! Grasshoppers survive winter and get bigger every year, so if you find any, you really should get rid of them while they're still "reasonably" small! The bigger they get, the harder they are to kill---and, the more they EATand the more they procreate!!! One other possibility on the morning glories---but don't think this is what it is---would be slugs. I don't see any "slime trails" in your pics, but if you can ever see any "shiny lines" on the leaves, then it's slugs! Slug bait is the only way I know of to get rid of slugs! (I don't know of any "effective" way to get rid of any of those things without using some insecticides! You could manually catch the grasshoppers and then "dispose" of themat Paulinos we used to catch them and FLING them into the pond and watch the koi chow down!but grasshoppers can be HARD to catch! And the honeysuckle bush just looks like a very old spider web that debris has blown into to me! Put on a pair of gloves and pull the debris apart to see if you see any caterpillars or anything inside, and if you don't, just clean up the mess and the webs and cut off any branches or foliage that looks bad. I'm not really seeing any insect damage at all on the plant itself. [Cleaning up your spider webs won't hurt the spiders! They'll just move somewhere else! And the honeysuckle webs look LONG deserted to me anyway! So does the "tomato web."] Does anybody else have any other helpful advice? Skybird

So I have a handful of different things growing in containers on my "patio" and the most confusing thing is that my sage plant (which I've read in many places has few insect problems) seems to be the only thing that's getting holes eaten in it's leaves. Not too long ago, we had a little bit of a cold snap, and since most of my plants are still young, I brought them inside for the week...when I suddenly had an explosion of house fly population (killed 8 one night and woke up to 12 new ones buzzing about) So I moved everything back outside and the flies disappeared. I've checked the sage numerous times and cant find much of anything in large numbers. I've found a few small red/white colored things that are nestled in the crook where some of the leaves meet the stem. and there have been a few spider web like things attached close to the stems as well. Any idea what it is? and what I can do to get rid of them w/o chemicals that cost more than a poor student can afford?

Steve, I think that's what they call a Velvet Ant, it's a wingless wasp. Spider Mites don't have stingers, and even if they did they're way too small to penetrate human skin. They have mouth parts similar to regular spiders but use them to rasp the surface of the plant and then they suck up the juices. The tiny stipple spots are where they've scratched and sucked up the plant juice. A close up of the Two Spotted Spider Mite. This is a common one, but they're many kinds. And how they look to the naked eye, up close. You can see the fine webbing with mites crawling on it. They're the tiny dots. It does look fairly different than regular spider webs. And here you can see the stipple spotted damage on a leaf; This is a pretty bad case on a lemon tree. The webbing, the tiny mites and the stippling can all be seen here. If you click on the pics, most will show it as a larger picture.