Poor 'Biscus

i know, i know...it's been a while. I'm terrible at this. there are so many things i've thought of posting...what i did with all that yarn from my last post, where you can send money to help the people of Haiti, a great photo from one of my more recent visits to the APL, hundreds of photos of the cats, but this post is about my poor, poor Hibiscus plant.
I fell in love with this plant. My neighbor had gotten the plant from a customer of her's and i flipped out about it so much she told me if i could manage to divide it and repot her half i was welcome to the other half.
It thrived all summer, huge blooms appeared almost overnight.

see? so pretty.
the weather turned colder, as it tends to do here in ohio, so the 'biscus came inside. i did some plant re-arranging and gave it a spot smack dab in the middle of the window in the living room. the flowers kept coming, not like when it was outside, but enough.
Then one morning i noticed what i thought was dust, or string, or cat hair, or spider webs. Then i looked closer. bunches of little somethings were crawling around on the webby looking threads.
i quick search of the interswebs revealed the invaders. spider mites.


ugh
one of the reasons i wanted one of these plants in the first place was becase we could feed the flowers to Bosch. so i looked for a way to try to kill the pests without chemicals. back to the intersweb i went, and was happy to find (from several different sources) that the best way to kill the mites was to soak the plant in hot water. perfect. so 'biscus got a bath.
and the damn things came back.
bath number two.
things seemed to be going well. the plant even had a growth spurt. and the damn mites came back again.
bath number three, and here is where we stand.

poor, poor 'biscus.
i'm hoping most of the leaf loss is from too much water. the tops seem to be continuing to grow. i've resigned my self to trying chemicals on it, and that Bosch won't get to have any flower treats. Being winter its proving hard to find the right spray (Bayer 3 in 1).
poor, poor 'biscus. i'm not giving up on you get buddy.