In July, a Midwest garden can feel like an ecosystem run amok… Until you stop and ID what’s going on.
You walk out there with your best corn or tomato and find it covered in something that looks spiky or fuzzy or even striped, and what happens next? Panic. Out comes the pesticide… Unless you learn to read the chart (above), which divide the pests (economic nightmares) from the guests (helpful pollinators), so you know if you’re on the attack or on defense.
How to Identify Garden Pests and Friends
Or take the Monarch caterpillar with its flashy stripes of black, white and yellow. You’ll know who it is soon enough, and leave well enough alone, since eventually it becomes a butterfly that pollinates your crops for you. Not all creatures who eat things on your plants are bad, though: sometimes they’re just mistaken for pests, because we don’t understand which is which. And remember: The Monarch eats only milkweed. Chances are good you’ve spotted a tomato-growing stray, or misidentified what that plant was, if the creature in question is munching on your tomatoes.
Knowing that connection… That link between beneficial creatures and their host plant, immediately narrows list of suspects before you even pick up the field guide. People make the mistake of thinking any kind of leaf chewer has to be bad, but many are just passing through as a pollinator-to-be.
The same applies to those that arrive with big appetites and harmful intent: scouting to see who is coming is more important then just spraying everything blindly. For instance, the Fall Armyworm feeds on corn (among other things) and has a very distinct inverted Y on its head; it will devour a whole whorl overnight if it warms up. In fact by the time you see what happened in row crops, it may be too late to simply pick him off. If you recognize that telltale mark earlier, when there are fewer of them, you can use targeted tactics such as Bacillus thuringiensis rather than an all-out attack to stop their population from exploding.
It’s always a race against biology…and time, but at least with proper ID, you’ve got a fighting chance, and haven’t killed off all the rest of the garden’s ecosystem. What you are looking for changes with the timing. In the spring, you have to watch for Eastern Tent Caterpillars on the fruit trees around here. In the summer, it become prime tomato hornworm and earworm season in the corn.
How do you know what to expect? Timing your interventions makes a difference, too. If you don’t know what to look for, obviously you can’t control it, but for serious growers, monitoring your plants every few days during peak action times is non-negotiable. The embedded infographic has a seasonal calendar of mayhem to help you know when things are coming. This way, you can have your defenses ready, either by setting up pheromone traps ahead of time or putting row covers in place.
Prevention really IS better than cure. Every. Single. Time.
If you’ve decided a particular caterpillar is a pest but want to know more before crushing its life force: Look closely before killing it. If it’s a tomato hornworm, and is encrusted with what appear to be grains of rice (actualy tiny white cocoons), leave it be. The little devils are parasitic wasp eggs about to consume the pest right back into nothingness from the inside out. Remove that caterpillar and you’ll eliminate dozens of potential wasps who might otherwise protect your garden for free.
This is one little lesson in why generalities don’t work in agriculture. Being specific produces not only cheaper, but smarter (and therefore healthier) results. The bottom line with Midwestern caterpillar control: Know your terrain. Learn to read it, and know its life cycle.
You don’t have to be an insect expert to distinguish between a Soybean Looper wreaking havoc on your cash crop versus a Luna Moth larva feeding on some oak leaves, because it boils down to paying close attention to size, host plant, texture and color. Treat the exercise of ID as a diagnostic tool, not a chore. And you move from being a victim of garden pests to an active manager of your land.
Next time you see something climbing up on one of your leaves, slow down for a second first, and that pause will become the place where the real farming starts. You should of seen it earlier.