 Planning for a vegetable garden also means having a plan for hungry insects that are going to come and have a taste. While a little insect damage may not reduce our harvest, without a plan large populations of insects may just destroy our plants. We are in the south and that means we're vulnerable to many insect pests. We have a warm temperatures, a long growing season and it makes it ideal for vegetable crops but also ideal for insects. And remember they have a highly developed sense for locating their host plants so some form of insect control is often necessary to protect our valuable harvest. The first rule in any insect management plan is to identify the pest. It's hard to know how to control something if we don't know what it is and it's very important to scout and monitor your garden. You know at least three times per week this can greatly reduce the damage from a lot of the insects. Some of the things I have found handy one a 10 power hand lens that really helps when you're not sure what's causing the damage a lot of these insects they're different stages that they're eggs they are really really small and also keeping good records that's going to help me in years to come to know when a pest came the year before or what I did that worked. And again learn to identify the different stages that insects go to and immature insects may not look anything like the adult it becomes. The best approach in any pest management plan is to use a combination of different control tactics. This is called integrated pest management. We can use things like cultural controls that might consist of removing plant debris. Some insects will overwinter and breed in the plant debris. Other cultural control methods would be early planting. Some varieties of vegetables can be planted a little earlier and that way they escape the late season pests. Mechanical controls or physical controls means physically excluding or removing the pests that would be hand picking or placing a row cover over vegetables to exclude the insects from coming in. And then last we also have our chemical controls and this too includes our organic chemicals. Aphids are an insect pest that most of us have encountered. You may have also heard of them as plant lice. These are very small soft bodied insects and depending on the type they can be yellow pink brown or black. Adults and their young both suck plant juices and cause distortion and stunning of new growth. Small plants can be severely weakened or even killed and because of their feeding method aphids carry several plant viral diseases that may be more destructive than the aphids themselves. They're going to feed on a variety of vegetables okra, cole crops, cucumbers, beans, peas, tomatoes. So observe your small plants closely in the spring and in some cases these small aphid populations they can be washed off with a strong stream of water spray before the population gets out of control. If you have grown tomatoes in Alabama before I'm sure you are familiar with hornworms. Hornworm larvae usually have green bodies with diagonal white stripes on the side or 8b shaped markings it depends on the species and these guys are voracious eaters and they start stripping the leaves as soon as they start feeding. They can grow longer than four and a half inches in length. The easiest way to control them is to hand pick and destroy the hornworms before they do all the damage. That can be difficult because they blend right in with the foliage but if you start noticing your leaves becoming stripped I would immediately start looking for the hornworms. You know get out your your magnifying glass if you need to that will help and hand pick and destroy. Now of course like all insects chemical options are there just make sure and and choose one that targets this specific pest. Adult and larval stages of Mexican bean beetles feed on the leaves of almost all beans snap beans, pole beans, lima beans. This is one insect where it helps to to really be able to identify the different life stages. You see the adults are copper colored they have 16 black dots on their on their backs. The larvae are yellow and they're covered with spines and then you see the eggs and and pupa the the inactive stage before the adult stage are also commonly seen on the foliage during the feeding stages and so some of the things that that we can do or we can look for these egg masses. The yellow eggs they're laid in clusters of 40 to 60 they're going to be on the undersides of the leaves so you have to do a little detective work but if you can hand pick and destroy the egg masses then you you're going to win the battle. Now if you do have to use chemical sprays remember that these guys are found on the undersides of the leaves so that's where you're going to have to target your sprays. The larvae of cucumber beetles feed on the roots of corn as well as cucurbits. The adults are yellowish green and we have both striped cucumber beetles and spotted cucumber beetles. The beetles eat holes in the leaves they'll eat holes in the flowers and young plants can be can be killed by these beetles. Cucumber beetles also transmit bacterial wilt which is a very destructive disease of cucurbits so it's best to get these guys under control as fast as we can. Now a biggie in this is this insect survives the winter as an adult and crop residue and weeds so really clean up the weeds and get the garden debris out in the fall so that you can reduce the population for next year. Now of course there are recommended insecticides for for big populations but on some some crops we could also use row covers remember those are used to exclude the insects from getting to the plant but if we are worried about pollination you will have to take the row cover off during the flowering time. All right so you go out to your garden and everything had been looking good and you go out there to see your squash kind of deflated wilted and dead you may have had an encounter with a squash vine borer the larva damaged squash plants by boring into the vines and crown and the infested plants will and die and you can see the the sawdust like insect eggs coming from the holes in the vine and that that's evidence of active larvae inside the stem. The adults are a clear winged moth they lay their eggs on the vines again early in the season and then once that hatches they go into the vine to start feeding and so it's sometimes they can be harder to control with chemicals because there's only a short time that there's exposure to a chemical before the young larvae buries into the vine itself and so some other control measures that we could use cleaning up our garden debris we could use pheromone sticky traps so that we know when the adult is in the area and then again floating row covers like we talked about earlier this would exclude the moth from being able to lay the egg but if you are growing you know something like squash that depends on bees for pollination you will have to remove that cover while it's flowering. So Colorado potato beetles are serious pests of Irish potatoes but they can also damage tomato egg plant and peppers so the adult beetle is about three-eighths of an inch long yellow with ten black stripes and hard shelled the larvae are they're humpbacked they're soft bodied and they're brick red with rows of black spots along the sides and so you will you could find groups of a dozen or more little orange barrel shaped eggs and again those will be on the undersides of the leaf each female is going to lay about 500 eggs so if we can you know hand pick the eggs off before they hatch that is a great way of controlling crop rotation is going to give you some satisfaction of some control over the insect and of course mulching the plants really well will help as well. So cabbage worms and cabbage lupers those are pretty common pests and they feed on all forms of cruciferous plants but they do prefer cabbage and cauliflower they also frequently damage turnips kale collards radishes and mustard so so a pretty good variety of plants when cabbage plants are small the cabbage worms feed primarily on the undersides of the developing leaves with when the heads develop the cabbage worms feed on the outer leaves and they'll start boring into the center and the larvae can also cause damage by contaminating the heads with with their excrement which we will see a lot you know when we're growing these in our own gardens and so when fully grown that larvae is going to be about an inch long it's velvety green some of them will have faint yellow stripes down the back they kind of again these match the foliage so they're hard to find but hand picking as soon as you see the excrement or the damage start looking with that magnifying glass and you can you can hand pick these this is another good crop that floating row covers would be would be great to cover the crops and exclude the pest squash bugs have piercing sucking mouth parts and they like to feed on cucurbits like squash and pumpkins and they make the plant sick through feeding and disease transmission they do take a long time to mature compared to other insects about about eight weeks and during this time the immature stages and adults feed alongside one another they produce shiny red egg clusters on various parts of the plant and again removing these egg clusters is key to to control and management the nymphs also tend to stay in clusters for protection so they're easy to easier to spot than a lot of other insects they will overwinter and they will hide in that debris so as as soon as you can have old plants or you know dead plants go ahead and get those out of your garden because those those are insect breeders so you may you may see evidence of spider mites but you just might need that magnifying glass to see them they are tiny and barely visible and they will suck plant juices from the undersides of the leaves in alabama we're going to see the larger populations when we have very hot dry weather when we have light infestation sometimes a spray of water will do it and other times you know you have to watch what chemicals you're spraying and that's why it's always good to have a plan and identify the insect because sometimes when we're using broad spectrum insecticides we we can we can kill off beneficials and and actually make the the spider mite population increase stink bugs and leafeted bugs have become one of my garden nemesis in late summer and that's when their population really begins to explode they suck plant juices from the undersides of leaves and the fruit and their characteristic damage varies with the type of vegetable on some beans little evidence of feeding damage may be visible on the outside of the pod but inside the beans are shriveled spotted little brown stains on tomatoes you may recall white yellow spots with pithy tissues inside from their feeding damage again there are late season pests but we have to start scouting for them earlier keep the garden weed free this provides a place for them to live and hide out so we really need a clean garden here some farmers are having a lot of success using perimeter trap crops and you know if needed these populations can explode quickly so apply the recommended insecticide but only after confirming that you have this pest species we have a lot of resources on our alabama extension web page that web page is www.aces.edu and here are a couple of the publications that that will be helpful to you and don't forget about our master gardener helpline if you need additional help identifying a pest or have questions about your own garden that's 877-252-4769