You didn’t mention what kind of mites you have, but guessing it’s two spotted. (If not disregard the rest of the post.) Indoors I would most certainly trash them. If you want to try and move outdoors then you
could try saving them. There’s a number of organic commercial products like
Pure Crop 1,
Lost Coast Plant Therapy, and
Green Cleaner which use vegetable oils and it’s pretty easy to replicate a homemade recipe on the cheap
Here’s a interesting study on
Soybean Oil Controls Two-Spotted Spider Mites
A good thread from Bill Farthing on
DIY recipes (He might have similar info on this site if you search).
Below is an easy 1 gal receipt with ingredients you can source today. Almost all the big brand vegetables oil (Wesson & Crisco) are soybean, so you probably already have it. The other two primary ingredients are
Hydrogen Peroxide & Isopropyl Alcohol, which if you don’t have can source at most major pharmacy (CVS, Walgreen, etc) or grocery store. You can use any Castile soap (like Dr Bonners) also available at any major grocery store. Don’t use a detergent but can use other dish soaps (Dawn, Palmolive, Ivory, etc). Also don’t worry about the silica or citric acid if you don’t have as they’re for PM control, with the silica also helping as a surfactant, which the soap also does.
1 TBSP soybean oil (.5oz) - typically 10-30 ml./gallon
1 TBSP Dr Woods peppermint soup - typically 7.5-30 ml./gallon
1 TBSP ISO (.5oz) - ~0.5-1 oz./gallon
2 TBSP
Hydrogen peroxide (1oz)
1 Tsp silica
.25g citric acid
Spray the shit out of the plants, especially the bottoms. And then repeat day 3 & 5 and see where you’re at. You could spray every day with such a nasty infestation (as it’s cheap, won’t harm the plants, and mites don’t built resistance to oils). Obviously like any oil, don’t do it in the sun. (If you move the plants outside they’ll need to be in the shade for a few days anyway.) You should be able to knock them down fairly well. Outside there’s always going to be
some mites around, but hopefully can get clean before it starts flowering.