garden pest control

 Identifying garden pests: How to find out who eats your plants

What is a Garden Insect?

For an insect to be considered an insect, it must cause significant economic or aesthetic damage to a plant. Yes, a lot of insects eat plants, but most of them do not cause significant damage. Moreover, in most cases, the harm caused by these insects is not life-threatening; It is not too hot to plant for a short time. An insect pest that kills its host plant is surprisingly rare; After all, removing the food source of an insect and the food source of future generations is not a great benefit.

Gardens are complex ecosystems inhabited by many-layered organisms. Although some of these organisms are harmful to our plants, it is important to remember that most of them are not.

Depending on the tolerance of each particular gardener, any amount of economic or aesthetic damage is considered “significant”. Once you realize that most leaf-sucking pests do not destroy your plants, your tolerance for their damage should naturally rise. Obviously, if you are a farmer who needs to grow the right crops for your livelihood, you will be much less tolerant of the pest damage that cuts into your basement than the Joe homeowner who grows a garden to help beautify your outdoor residence...

Insect numbers are also important. A teenage small aphid is not a pest because the damage it causes is minimal, but hundreds of aphids can cause very significant amounts of damage, and the gardener will have to step in with a management strategy. On the other hand, a tomato hornworm can nab an entire tomato plant, so even if there is a hornwort, implementing certain management tricks is definitely called for.

Aesthetic damage often does not harm the health of your plants; It reduces their appearance. In most cases, the gardener must tolerate some amount of aesthetic damage.

This means that determining whether or not a particular pest is worth the time, money, and effort to control is determined by carefully considering your individual tolerance, type of damage, and a number of existing pests. Every gardener’s opinion will vary, but I encourage you not to go too fast, because not only are the plants very forgiving, you will learn later in the chapter that many pest problems are managed by naturally beneficial predatory insects.

Determining whether or not it is worth controlling a pest is based on your personal tolerance, the amount of damage, and the number of pests present in the plant.

Why do you need to identify pests in your garden?

Another essential step in determining whether pest control action is needed is to make sure that you identify garden pests correctly and that you understand their life cycle and the extent of the damage they cause. For example, some insects have a life cycle that lasts only a few weeks, while others only eat plants for a short period of their lives, so taking action against one of these two groups of insects is not worth the time and effort and the pest will go away before it causes more damage. At the opposite end of the spectrum are insects, which are capable of producing several generations in a single growing season. Their population can explode in a short period of time, causing great damage in a relatively short period of time. The only way to know how much of a pest's life cycle affects the amount of damage it can cause is to correctly identify garden pests and learn about them before you decide to take any action. There are various ways to do this.

Methods of identifying garden pests

1. Identify garden pests by physical description. This identification system considers the size, shape, color, number of legs, number of wings, and other physical characteristics of the insect. This is a useful method if you have access to a good pest ID book (see list below) or a website that compares photos with live insects in your garden.

Identifying these blister beetle-like insects by their physical characteristics is one way to determine who is chewing on your plants. Help kill using a good insect identification book or website.

2. Identify garden pests by type of damage.

Often the insect is not really in the plant; Instead, we face damage. Insects are easier to identify than they appear to be because of the damage they cause. Many insects have very unique diets and the damage they leave is beyond doubt. This identification method often goes hand in hand with the next method, because if you find a particular type of damage on a particular host plant, it helps to further reduce the possibilities.

3. Identify garden pests by the host plant.

In many cases, the leafhopper feeds only on selected species or families of plants. Some insect pests are so special that they can only feed on one type of host plant (asparagus beetles, holly leaf miners, and rose bushes, to name a few). Matching plant species with commonly-eating insects is another key to unlocking an insect's identity.

Some insects have very unique damage that makes them easy to identify. Hibiscus sawfly larvae are responsible for this hole-filled leaf.

Sometimes one of these three methods is all you need to correctly identify garden pests. At other times it may be necessary to use a mixture of two or three of them.

Identification of non-pest garden pests

For non-pest garden pests, you can use the same three methods you use to identify garden pests that are pests. If you can’t see the animal eating your garden for a long time to get a physical description (maybe they eat at night?), Look at how they feed the plants and what plants they eat. You can search for footprints in and around the garden. Or, if you do not see any traces, spray an all-purpose flour coating around the previous plants and see whose footprints are in the dust the next morning.