Gardening: A volunteer tomato plant was thriving. Then spider mites came.

Just when I thought my volunteer cherry tomato plant would continue to thrive into its second year, it became infested with spider mites and had to be removed.

Last September, it had sprouted in the well of a crawl space entrance and produced hundreds of tomatoes throughout this spring and summer. It was still sending out plentiful clusters of fruit, but they refused to turn red. Instead, they remained orange with white spots and turned mushy on the vine. Many of the plant’s leaves were turning yellow from voracious two-spotted spider mites. The yellowing, eventually turning to brown, starts with stippling or tiny dots on the foliage where mites have pierced the leaves’ epidermis with their stylets or sucking mouthparts. Although mites are arachnids, the most common garden insect pests, n