Pests: the bad and the ugly

[Sara]

Hi everyone,

Has a particular pest swamped your plot in 2010? If you've spent hours picking caterpillars off your cabbages or controlling aphids, the GYO team would like to know.

All sorts of bugs can cause trouble on the veg garden, from wireworms to vine weevils and (my personal enemy) slugs. We'd like to know if one pest has really stood out in the last few months and what methods you've used to keep it in check.


Your comments may be edited and published in the magazine's December issue.

[rustylady]

Sparrows eating my seedlings, caterpillars eating my brassicas, and now I have loads and loads of snails (entire families ranging from grandmas and grandpas to tiny weeny baby ones) and they are all eating my plants.

[Pies]

Pesky whitefly,i netted my brassicas against CWB the net is fine enough to stop them, but whitefly get in but their preditors cant,the sprays aren't very effective

[taff]

Caterpillars and more caterpillars, and they were netted too!!! The butterflies must have had shovels and pickaxes this year to burrow underneath.

[Two_Sheds]

Slugs didn't appear until the end of August (we had a long drought early summer and they laid low), but I picked and killed 350 from my (small) home garden in one week recently

Lily beetles have been a major pest once again: despite daily picking & crushing, they just keep coming

[Bramble_killer]

We started off with masses of aphids on EVERYTHING. beans, chillies, all the annual herbs.

The nematodes held the slugs at bay then the long hot summer kept them low. Then it rained. As it dried out, we found slugs everywhere It ate my pumpkins, decimated my teeny tiny potato crops that was also attacked by wireworm.

Netted the brassicas but forgot the collars so the flea beetles did what the white cabbage didn't find.

Now some immense giant caterpillars eating the tomatoes and aubergines.

And spiders everywhere!!

Still managed to crop loads somehow through all that, no idea how!

[chris]

Slugs here - loads. Killed over 100 in one night, slowly have been giving up though. I've had 5 PSB plants devastated by CWBs, and my gooseberry bush was stripped by I guess sawfly caterpillars.

Bar that, had a few fleabeetles nibbling and the odd cat trying to deposit presents in the garden.

I've a pair of scissors I use to snip slugs in half, and have been picking/flicking caterpillars off and stamping on them - that's about it really as I'm trying to be organic!

[crazii_c]

Vine weevils! they dessimated my strawbs and herbs which i had overwintered from last year. ive spotted the little buggers again munching on my potatoes. i mainly grow in containers so the weevils mean bad news! ive applied nematodes to all my containers. fingers crossed it will kill off the little maggots. orelse i'll be buying more strawbs again next year.

[MagicLady]

Definitely slugs and snails. They've totally anialated (?sp) my cabbages Used slug pellets, which seemed to help, but had to be careful because of the kids and dog.

[Nordmead]

only pests ive had are pepper maggots destroying 1 of my 2 peppers that managed to grow and ants bringing up aphids onto the plants.. think i may need to put glue bands around the pots or something

[womble]

Ants have eaten all my tomatillos which fall off the plant when they are ripe.

[Topcat36]

Vine weevil's in a couple of pots. Slugs as usual spent many a night hunting them down and flinging them in the green wheelie bin , these things are so fat an huge . caterpillars, tho not really affected my crop ;/. oh and my 3rd lot of spinach was totally destroyed by some nasty little critter , not sure what it was yet but i am investigating Lilly beetle ,just kept removing them so no real problem there .

[Nicos]

We've had an unusual pest this year....a peacock!!!

It's munched it's way through all our blackberries and most of our lettuce, cabbage, kale and courgette plants.

And it's proving impossible to catch.

[northepaul]

I had a load of problems with blackfly firstly on my broadies, then when I got rid of them, on to my beans and oregano. My first sowing of kale and broccolli got demolished by caterpillars and both my gooseberry plants got completely stripped by sawfly, which then moved over to my red currants.....
I seem to have much more trouble with snails than slugs...?!?

[vicky]

Wireworms caused me the most problems. I have a plot that was a field this time last year and they are a common pest of newly cultivated ground. Regular cultivation will gradually get rid of them which means I can't try a 'no dig' plot yet! King Carrot gave me a tip of burying a piece of potato tied to string and pulling it up every week to remove the wireworms which would feed in it! Wireworm fishing! I had damage to every onion I harvested and my Charlotte potatoes suffered badly too. I will be planting wireworm resistant potatoes next year and I am hoeing and turning the soil over on the plot weekly to expose them.