11 Common Garden Pests - Garden Pest Identification

Check out how tall these beans have gotten. They're huge. A thriving garden is going to attract a whole host of insect life from pollinators to pests to the carnivorous insects that feed off of the pests like our praying mantises and wasps and the carnivorous ladybugs. In this video I'm going to be identifying some of the more common garden pests. It's always good to know what bug is what in your garden. So what we have here is a mating pair of squash bugs and squash bugs are a sap sucking insect and they mainly attack squash, hence the name, but they'll also attack your cucumbers and 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 plants so they could do a number on your young squash plants. Once the plants get bigger they can handle the damage a little bit better but 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 their way to being adults. They're more gray colored, a little bit easier to see. Now the adults look just like wood chips and they're really hard to find if they're not on the leaves. See they look just like a wood chip or garden debris and they'll be very still and you'll never see them. These are some hatchlings. They don'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. See 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. Yeah see here's some. Usually in clusters of about 20 or so and they're a shiny copper color and they're hard so I usually just scrape them off of the leaves and toss them in my bucket. I usually spend about an hour in the evenings picking off bugs and eggs off my plants. This bucket's just water with dish soap. The dish soap keeps the bugs from being able to crawl back out. This is a cabbage worm. It's the caterpillar for the cabbage white butterfly. If you ever see those little white butterflies flitting around in your garden you think they're cute. Well they are, but they're probably laying eggs on your brassicas. These are brussel sprouts that I've kind of neglected. This is not damage caused by cabbage worms. This is caused by slugs. Now the slugs usually come out at night. That's why you don't see anything on these plants doing this damage in the day. So you can either go out at night and pick them off or some people will put sand around the base of their brassicas because 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. Now this looks like a ladybug and it is related to the ladybugs. It's not carnivorous unfortunately. It's a plant eater and it's kind of a dull coppery color with small black dots. Here's another plant eating 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 right 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 and very slow moving so this is an easy one to catch and keep under control. And here's one of those larvae that's entered into the pupal stage right before they turn into a beetle. They'll attach themselves to one spot for a few days while they're pupating. And 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 pest. They do a ton of damage to things like grapevines and fruit trees and unfortunately my strawberries here. These are Japanese beetles and these are the adults. Now 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. Now these things have the grubs that live under the ground in the dirt, the big white grubs. This is the squash vine borer. The moths 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. You can see the hole here. Now I've had some success with just covering up the bases of my plants with dirt and mulch and I guess it kind of suffocates the larvae that are in there or 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. Now this is the cucumber beetle and they mainly attack your cucumber plants but they'll also attack your beans and your squash and I've 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. They're 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. Now here we have some aphids on the underside of my squash plant. Teeny tiny aphids with little ant farmers. 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. And this is my sunflower and it's got carpenter ants and a bigger kind of aphid on the leaves and you can see the yellowing in the leaf where the aphids are 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 gonna let them be. Plus they're really cool. If it was on my vegetable plants I would probably get rid of them but this is just my sunflower. This giant caterpillar is the tobacco hornworm. This one is on a potato plant but they will attack your tomatoes. They're related to the tomato hornworm but it's not the same thing. It's actually really kind of cool and I hate to get rid of it. Alright guys well that's all for today and I hope you enjoyed the video. If you would please hit that like button and subscribe. Your support is very much appreciated.