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Gardener's Q&A

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Persimilis or Red Spider Mite??

By:MoOli

Hello! I recently started my first garden bed and everything has been growing beautifully! I live in NSW Australia and it is currently Spring here. I have been noticing insect life in the garden. Ants, little flies, worms and garden spiders. All was fine until I spotted hundreds of microscopic orange-ish spider looking things crawling all over my soil and mulch. I took a further look with the zoom on my phone camera and found that the bigger ones are orange and the almost unseeable ones are clear. I did a lot of reading on mites yesterday and it seems that the most common pest mite is the Two Spotted Mite (Red Spider Mite). My little friends don't have two spots on the back however, I read they can turn red-orange during cooler weather and seeing as we are just coming out of winter, I'm concerned that this might be the case. I have also been noticing small-ish webs on the soil. I'll add photos below. My plants seem to be doing fine. One of my green bean leaves was eaten but it has slime all over it so I'm guessing a snail made his way through. This has me confused and worried because I can't tell if they are Predatory Mites (Persimilis), Pest Mites, or maybe even just baby spiders from my Garden Spiders!! I have already become emotionally attached to my veggies and I would be devastated if they got eaten up by some tiny pests! I also found a few of these small caterpillar- larva looking things if you can identify. Hopefully not a problem. Please help to identify and if they are pests, any advice on how to organically deal with them would be much appreciated.

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