Free pest & disease guide
Garden pests & diseases.
Every common garden pest and disease, with how to spot it, the organic fixes that actually work, and something no other guide has: live reports from gardeners of what's active near you right now. See something in your garden? Tell us, it warns your neighbors.
Caterpillars & worms
Leaf and fruit chewers, hand-pick or hit them with Bt.
A single one can strip a tomato plant of its leaves overnight.
Velvety green caterpillars that chew brassicas into lace.
The caterpillar feeding down inside the tip of the ear.
Seedlings clipped off at the soil line overnight.
A striking striped caterpillar, and a future swallowtail butterfly.
Beetles
Chewers and skeletonizers, row covers and hand-picking do a lot.
Striped beetles and orange grubs that can defoliate a potato row in days.
Small yellow beetles whose real danger is the wilt disease they carry.
A coppery ladybug look-alike that skeletonizes bean leaves into lace.
Metallic beetles that chew leaves down to lace between the veins.
Tiny jumping beetles that pepper young leaves with shot-hole pits.
Sucking & rasping insects
Sap feeders that curl, stipple, and wilt leaves.
Gray shield bugs that wilt a healthy squash plant in days.
Silvery streaks and curled leaf tips that show up in hot spells.
Fine webbing and pale stippling that flare up in hot, dry spells.
Clusters on new growth, sticky leaves, and curling tips.
Borers
Stem and vine tunnelers, timing and covers are everything.
Flies & maggots
Root and fruit maggots and leaf tunnelers.
Rusty tunnels in the roots and stunted tops. Cover the row; rotate away from last year's carrots.
Seedlings wilt; white maggots in the bulb base. Float a row cover over the row; rotate beds each year.
Winding pale tunnels or blotches inside the leaves. Pick and destroy mined leaves; cover the row.
Soft, quickly-rotting ripe berries with tiny larvae inside. Pick often, chill fast, hang traps, exclude with fine netting.
Slugs & snails
Night feeders that leave holes and slime.
Diseases
Blights, mildews, molds, and rusts, airflow and prevention win.
The fast-moving, plant-killing blight behind the Irish potato famine.
Brown bullseye spots that creep up from the oldest leaves first.
The catch-all name for brown, spreading dead patches on leaves.
White flour-like dust on the tops of leaves, worst in late summer.
Pale angular patches on top, gray-purple fuzz underneath, in cool damp weather.
Fuzzy gray-brown mold on fruit and flowers in cool, damp weather.
Orange, rusty pustules on leaf undersides that rub off on your finger.
The other side
Beneficial insects
Not every bug is the enemy. These are the predators and parasites that eat the pests above, for free all season. Learn to spot them (their larvae look scary on purpose), and how to build a garden they want to live in.
The aphid vacuum every garden wants, and its ugly larva does most of the work.
The delicate green adult is harmless; its larva is a soft-bodied-pest assassin.
Looks like a tiny wasp, stings nothing, and its larva quietly eats your aphids.
Tiny, stingless wasps that turn hornworms and aphids into nurseries.
The night-shift predator that eats the slugs and cutworms you never see.
The garden's most famous ambush hunter, dramatic but not the aphid answer.
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