Common Garden Pests and How to Identify

In the carnivorous ladybugs. In this article, I’m going to be identifying some of the more common garden pests. It’s always good to know what bug is in your garden?

 

 

Common Garden Pests and How to Identify

1. Squash Bugs

So, what we have here is a mating pair of squash bugs. Squash, bugs are sap-sucking insects and they mainly attack squash hence the name, but they’ll also attack your cucumbers in your melons.

Squash bugs overwinter, as adults in your garden debris and then they come out in the spring and lay eggs on your new plant. So they could do a number of damages to your young squash plants.

Once the plants get bigger, they can handle the damage a little bit better. We want to break the cycle and catch as many of the adults as we can.

So they don’t get the chance to lay eggs. Next year. This is a group of nymphs on the way to being adults who are more gray-colored a little bit easier to see. The adults look just like when chips and they’re really hard to find if they’re not on the leaves.

Say I look just like a wood chipper Garden, debris in. They’ll be very still and you’ll never see them. These are some hatchlings. It doesn’t look anything like the adults right now. They’re just black with these green round butts. And I’ll just knock these off of the leaves into my bucket.

If I can find some eggs on this plant. Now, normally, they’ll lay their eggs on the underside of leaves. And most often on the lower leaves of the plant. Yes. He hears them. Usually in clusters of about 20 or so. And they are a shiny copper color and they’re hard. So I usually just scrape them off of the leaves and toss them in the bucket.

I usually spend about an hour in the evenings picking up bugs and eggs off my plants. This bucket is just water with dish soap. The dish soap keeps the bugs from being able to crawl back out.

Read also: How to Remove Bed Bugs Infestation Permanently

 

2. Cabbage Worm

This is a cabbage worm. It’s the caterpillar for the cabbage white, butterfly. You saw those little white butterflies floating around in your garden. You think they’re cute, they are. But they’re probably lying on your brassicas.

These are brussels sprouts that I’ve kind of neglected. This is not damage caused by cabbage worms.

 

Read also: How to Get Rid of Rats in House Fast and Effective Ways

 

3. Slugs

All the slugs usually come out at night. It’s why you don’t see anything on these plants doing this damage and the day. So you can either go out at night and pick them off or some people will put sand around the base of the brassicas.

It’s too dry and sharp for the slugs to be able to crawl across. I haven’t tried that though. I might need to do that now.

 

Read also: How to Use ULV Fogger for Pest Control

 

4. Ladybug and Squash Lady Beetle

Ladybugs are not carnivorous. Unfortunately, it’s a plant-eater and it’s kind of a dull coppery color with small black dots.

Another planting ladybug. This is squash lady Beetle and it looks a lot like the Mexican bean Beetle, except it’s more orange, a little shinier and it’s got bigger black spots and it’s got one extra big black spot kind of in the middle there.

Now, the larvae of these two beetles look the same. They’re both yellow with black spines, they’re very tiny when they hatch but they molt a few times until they’re about this big. They’re very easy to see in very slow-moving. So this is an easy one to catch and keep under control.

Here’s one of those larvae that are entered into the pupil stage, right before they turn into a beetle. They’ll attach themselves to one spot for a few days while they are pupating the eggs.

Also, look the same for these two beetles. And unfortunately, they look the same for the red ladybugs, but I have not seen any of these here. So I’m going to destroy these eggs assuming that they are of the plant-eating sort.

Now, this is a pretty notorious past. They do a ton of damage to things like grapevines in three trees and unfortunately, in my strawberries.

 

5. Japanese Beetles

Japanese beetles will do a lot of damage to plants. I’ll just pick those off of the leaves and throw them into my bucket. And hopefully, I’ll be able to prevent them from laying a lot of eggs. These things have the grubs that live under the ground in the dirt, the big white girl.

 

6. Squash Vine Borer

The malls are kind of an orangish-red with black wings, and they lay their eggs at the base of your squash plants and their larvae bore into the vines.

I’ve had some success with just covering up the basis of my plants with dirt and mulch and I guess it kind of suffocates the larvae that are in there.

You can cut them out. I’ve done that before. They tend to lay single eggs on the stems of your plants, so they can be really hard to find.

 

7. Cucumber Beetle

They mainly attack your cucumber plants, but they’ll also attack your beans in your squash and I have seen them on pretty much everything. These suckers are able to transmit bacterial wilt between your plants and they’re very fast-moving and very hard to catch that are yellow with black stripes.

These are flea beetles teeny, tiny black, beetles that hop and they leave these itty-bitty, little holes in your plants and when they come they seem to come in the thousands.

So picking them off is not really going to work. So I have not tried this spray, but I think I’m going to give it a go and see if it helps at all, and they’ll attack pretty much anything.

 

8. Ants

If it’s on the underside of my squash plant teeny tiny aphids with little ants. It’s actually kind of cool. They don’t seem to be hurting the plant too much so I might leave them be because I like having the ants around, this is my sunflower and it’s got carpenter ants in a bigger kind of aphid on the leaves.

And you can see the yellowing in the leaf for the aphids or sucking the sap out of the plant, but they don’t seem to be hurting.

The plant that much and I really like having the ants around because they help to keep pests away. So I think that I’m just going to let them be. Plus, they’re really cool. If it was on my vegetable plants, I would probably get rid of them.

 

9. Sunflower Giant Caterpillars

The sunflower giant caterpillars are also known as the tobacco hornworm. This one is on a potato plant that will attack your tomatoes are related to the tomato hornworm, but it’s not the same thing.

It’s actually really kind of cool but I have to get rid of it. All right guys, well, that’s all for today.

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