How damaged are your bindweed plants looking? If you actually have the bindweed mites, the damage will progress and will be much more obvious than damage from regular spider mites, and the bindweed will become incredibly twisted and curled with some galls. I'll link a Colorado State document that shows advanced bindweed damage.

I get regular spider mite damage on bindweed and morning glories all the time, even when the tomato plants are fine, but I've never had any of the bindweed damage progress to the point that it has the sort of damage done by bindweed gall mites, so I'm pretty sure all I have here are the standard red spider mites, which infest everything in hot, dry summers to some degree. I even have bermuda mites on the bermuda grass most summers but, sadly, they don't kill it.

It would be amazing if you have the bindweed gall mites there and you'd have to wonder where they came from because they move very, very slowly in terms of distance (a mere few feet per year in most cases).

Some years, by the way, I have just stopped watering in Severe, Extreme or Exceptional Drought and let the spider mites have the garden and, when I do that, my tomato leaves almost exactly resemble the photos of severely damaged bindweed in the photos at the link below, so I'm still not sure if that sort of damage would help you make sure you have bindweed gall mites. Perhaps looking at them through a handheld magnifying glass might help ID them. I'm not sure, but I think some people with russett mites can identify them (distinguishing them from the more common red spider mites) with just a magnifying glass (since most of us don't have a microscope sitting around the house).

While bindweed gall mites feed only on bindweed and a couple of other very closely related plants, other types of spider mites also feed on bindweed.

Bindweed Info From CSU

Huh. I love how one person notices something and I find it here. (So y'all quit finding bad things, okay?) I was looking at the wild cucumber things, which happen to be behind my mildewy zinnias, when I noticed a leaf with mildew, a bindweed leaf. There are a lot of leaves like this. Brought it in and looked at it with DH's 15x loupe. Nothing moved. I should have been able to see spider mights, I think at that magnification, but I couldn't identify any. There could have been round white things and some kind of tan ones, but I couldn't see legs. Mostly the leaf looked like it had dandruff. My unscientific belief is that it really is a form of mildew. I'm going out now to get a zinnia leaf to compare.

Yes, the mildew on the zinnia looks much the same. I realize different plants have different species of mildew, but what if I could plant zinnias along my fence and make the bindweed sick? LOL. However, the honeyvine milkweed and those cucumbers look just fine.

Thanks for the info. I haven't seen any of this gall. I'll keep a close eye, now. If I see it, I shall coddle it, love it and reproduce it. LOL

Amy, I hate to burst your bubble, but I have a large plot of zinnias at the SE corner of the front garden, and they periodically get PM. I also have bindweed that pops up there occasionally, usually in August when I have decided it is too hot and too snakey to weed. The bindweed grows through the zinnias and gets the PM and it doesn't die. I believe I have that situation going on in that corner of the garden right now.

Bon, It is possible, but not likely that you have the bindweed gall mites there. They are imported from Europe and hard to obtain, except in a couple of states where those states' Ag Ext service has managed to get them established. They share them by giving away infested bindweed. You have to drive to their location, pick it up, bring it home and interwine the infested bindweed among your bindweed and, obviously, in those states the window of opportunity to get the mites is very narrow. These little suckers do not spread easily even in a place where they've been established, though in one research study, after infested bindweed was mowed, they did disperse and move over 600 yards in just a few days, apparently in search of more bindweed. So, unless you are very near one of the sites where OSU or some research group has tried to establish bindweed mites, I cannot imagine you've have any of them. Years ago (it might have been in the 1990s, I no longer remember), the Texas A&M extension service tried to establish them in multiple sites in Texas. I don't know how it worked out, but it was a very slow process. I think they got good results where they got them to establish, but getting them established was hard. In a perfect world, the bindweed mites would spread like kudzu, but sadly, this is not a perfect world. Oh, and like all mites, they don't do well in high humidity and plentiful rainfall, so it would be iffy to see them establish a thriving population anywhere in OK, except in the driest parts of western OK where rain is generally scarce most of the time.

Dawn

Aw dang. :(

Well, Bon, you just ever know. Strange things happen in gardens. Maybe you have Teenage Mutant Ninja Bindweed Mites who escaped from a research site dozens or hundreds of miles away and somehow ended up in your garden. I just think that the odds are really slim.