How to Identify Organic Vegetable Garden Pests

Successful organic vegetable gardening requires distinguishing helpful organisms, like ladybugs, from pests.

Organic gardeners depend on integrated pest management to control pests in their garden without using harmful chemicals. Integrated pest management uses a holistic and multifaceted approach to prevent pest problems and treat potentially harmful outbreaks. One of the key stages of integrated pest management, according to the Clemson Cooperative Extension, is correctly identifying pests in your garden. Correct identification not only allows you to discover causes of the problem, treat the pest and develop preventative solutions, it also prevents you from spending time and money eliminating "pests" that are actually harmless or even beneficial to your garden.

Instructions

1. Identify the host plant. Some vegetable species have been bred for resistance to common pests, allowing you to eliminate those pests as possibilities. Once you know the species and cultivar of your vegetable plant, learn what is normal for the plant -- size, foliage color, and flower and fruit development -- and common pests for that plant in your area.

2. Eliminate possible abiotic causes, such as nutritional problems, poor drainage or lack of water.

3. Identify signs of the problem. Pests include not just insects and weeds but fungi and other disease organisms as well. In some cases, you may be able to directly observe the potential pest, such as finding insects on your plants. In other cases, you may need to use plant symptoms to research possible causes and establish a diagnosis.

4. Locate an identification resource for the type of pest you're attempting to identify. For example, field guides can help with identifying insects or weeds, and extension offices often publish information helping gardeners to identify common pests in their area.

5. Observe and describe the pest and the symptoms it produces on your plant. Use your resources to guide you to look for important identifying features. For example, using North Carolina State University's TurfFiles website to identify weeds, you are prompted to observe the shape of the stem and leaves.

6. Identify potential pests and match the description in your resources to what you have observed in your vegetable garden. Don't forget to pay attention to host species, life cycle and geographical range. For example, it is unlikely that squash bugs will prove a pest on your lettuce plants. Likewise, you are unlikely to find an insect that emerges in the fall afflicting your asparagus in the spring.

7. Contact your local extension office for help, if you still can't identify the pest. Extension offices have entomologists and plant pathologists trained to diagnose pest problems and offer solutions for prevention and treatment.

8. Decide if the organism is a pest and determine the potential for harm. Ladybug larvae, for example, look scary and ugly but feed on pests, not plants. You want them in your garden. Others may not cause enough harm to your vegetables to warrant treatment. Once you have a correct identification, begin researching organic treatments and methods to prevent further infestations.

References

• Clemson Cooperative Extension: Integrated Pest Management (IPM)
• University of Missouri Extension: Preventing and Managing Plant Diseases
• North Carolina State University -- TurfFiles: Turf & Weed ID
• Alabama Cooperative Extension Service: Garden Bugs

Resources

• Clemson Cooperative Extension: Selected Pest Identification Web Sites and Publications