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Vegetable Garden Pests
When you raise edible vegetables in a home vegetable garden, many creatures besides you will want to visit and dine.
In this section, learn how to spot, identify, and control the most common insects, bugs, mollusks—slugs and snails—that are common to find in your vegetables. You’ll also find tips on preventing damage to your vegetables from a variety of animal pests, from pets to deer.
This section contains:
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- Descriptions of damage to vegetables caused by insect and other pests.
- Pest prevention measures.
- How to recognize early signs of pest damage to vegetables before infestations become serious.
- How to identify specific pests from descriptions of them and the damage they cause to vegetables.
- Treatments and cures for common vegetable pest infestations.
- Organic, natural, and non-toxic control measures for use on vegetables you eat.
Pests of Vegetables
The most serious threats to the health of a vegetable garden are due to insect or animal pests eating, damaging, or trampling fruit and foliage.
Recognize how animal and insect pests attack plants and how to control them.
While animals damage plants by eating or trampling them, most insect pests harm plants in one of four major ways: chewing, sucking, scoring or rasping, or boring.
The number of harmful animal pests is relatively few. Most can be excluded from the garden by erecting fences, caging your vegetables, frightening them away, or otherwise preventing them from harming your garden.
Insects that eat, blemish or destroy plants are often large and easily seen; only a few are microscopic. Nearly all have some natural enemies. Because of these traits and characteristics, controlling insect pests usually is easily accomplished by following a series of progressive steps [see Integrated Pest Management].
Fortunately, over 90 percent of the insects you may see on vegetable plants are either harmless or beneficial—predators that attack harmful insects, other bugs, or their eggs.
Animal Pests
Slugs and snails or mammals—especially those of large size such as deer, opossum, rabbit, and raccoon—are capable of inflicting serious damage on your garden and its plants. They are attracted to your tender young vegetables.
Animal pests can strip plants bare or browse entire areas of a vegetable garden to the ground in a single evening.
Rodents are omnivores that eat berries, corn, and many types of fruit. Gophers are herbivores that dig up and dine on succulent roots. Moles are carnivores that uproot plants as they seek burrowing insects to eat. Mollusks such as slugs and snails devour and score sufficient foliage to denude plants to their branches.
Another category of animal pest, birds are especially fond of tender shoots and ripening berries, but also hunt insects drawn to your vegetables. Sometimes birds harm many plants while seeking out their preferred food.
Two approaches generally are successful for animal pests: exclusion and trapping.
Exclusion. Fences are best for larger animals. For deer, either a single fence 8 ft. (2.4 m) or more tall or two perimeter fences, 6 ft. (1.8 m) tall and set 3 ft. (90 cm) apart, is effective.
Large deer may be able to hurdle a single tall fence, but all become uncertain when faced with two shorter fences and a long horizontal distance.
In gardens prone to burrowing animals, set wire cages below your plantings and bury perimeter fences at least 18 in. (45 cm) deep in the soil.
For smaller mammals, individual fencing of beds may be sufficient [see Fences and Animal Pests].
Trapping. A variety of humane and live traps are available for both burrowing and above-ground pests. Traps even may be used to attract snails and slugs, using beer as the bait. Once caught in a low saucer of beer, these mollusks drown or can be collected and destroyed.
A Gallery of Garden Pests
Tomato hornworms, cabbageworms, birds, rodents, deer, and corn earworms are common vegetable garden pests. While large mammals can cause massive damage in a single evening, most pests are small-scale feeders that you can note and control during your regular garden inspections.