Ooooh, thank you dearest @riverflows! This is a lovely reward to receive indeed, for enjoying and connecting! The comments post challenge is a beautiful way to get a convenientcross-section of current activity. 💚🌍💐🙏 I hope to participate in this challenge, with bugs and gremlins in my electrics 😋😫

We had to go around the property today and find all the blackbird nests. They've reached plague proportions and whilst I don't mind a few, as they eat grubs in the soil, I can't plant a single seedling with them ripping them out. We found six nests each with a few eggs in. Better to take the eggs rather than kill baby birds which I can't bring myself to do. Two were in the engine bay of the guest bus, three in bushes and this beautiful one was in the basket of my bicycle! They are so beautiful. But I just can't live with them tearing apart my garden and can't even imagine another twenty birds around. Fun fact, they were released five miles from here in the 1800s as the landowner was dead keen on the europification of the countryside. Same with the rabbits. If I had a time machine I'd go back and kill him. Worse than Hitler.

Hi and greetings how are you? This is a good selection for awarding these hive gardeners. they are very clever and their comments are really top ones. a hug ❤️😊

Thanks @riverflows! Be careful when you send my prize because you spelled my name wrong AGAIN! lol its steven with a V. Can't wait to see everyones pests this week. Fun topic 🐛🐰🐿️

@tipu curate

Have you tried using blood meal as a deterent to the pesky unknowns that are nipping off the tops of your beautiful lavenders? 💜

Sprinkle a light amount of blood meal across the leaves and at the base of the plants, then cross your fingers and hope it works! 🌬🌿🤞

Upvoted and curated! @riverflows

Those are some nasty animals spoiling your crops! It's sometimes hard to find a friendly way of removing them.

As an amateur gardener that just started a small vegetable garden in his own backyard I also have small problems.
I had planted broccoli and the leaves were showing holes after a few weeks.
I suspected snails to nibble on the leaves, so I put pieces of broken egg shell and residu from grinded coffee beans around them....
Until I found out that the culprit was even smaller than I suspected:

I found this little guy on one of the leaves one day. Very tiny, but since it was just another shade of green than the leaves, I managed to spot him.

Maybe you could send me some of your birds @riverflows so they can remove all my caterpillars :D

Good day to you @riverflows.
Thanks for the hive, so nice of you.
It's funny that you are talking about lavender, I am harvesting mine this morning. I already dried out the flowers I clipped last week, now I am making sachets from the last of the live leaves. I love the stuff.

Trying hard to get back into #hive, it's been a tough few months for me. My youngest sister has been very sick, she already is compromised since a car accident 28 years ago left her paralyzed from the chest down. She has suffered so much, but her will to live is inspiring, she's a fighter and has improved in the last two weeks.

So, as a pick me up, I am enjoying my lovely lavender.

Thanks again for all your support.

Not much happening in mine. Packing up and moving to sunnier pastures. Then I'll be growing again 👣

Those tiny things can really do a number on vegetation, we found them in our cabbage this year. We would use a hose and flush them out with blasts of water, but we had to check them everyday.

We deal with an array of pests in the gardens. Rabbits got to the string beans, slugs go after the potatoes and Japanese beetles eat my roses. Pisses me off.

A garden with no challenge is no garden at all. Frustrating as it is I an sure you will find a way to work around it. I am told human urine stink keeps animals away.
LOL I don't know how you'll do it, but you could give it a thought.
I have some scaly insects which have adapted themselves to the hibiscus plant and have colonized it. These have successfully stopped my plant from blooming. Neem oil mixed with dish wash soap is my answer. I have been at it for the last few days since I discovered them. Take a look at these tiny crab like creatures. They are the same color as the flowers, notice the petal in the same image.

Oh garden pests. Last year, I declared a war with some of them. I don't know its name but that tiny white small bugs that ate all of my basil leaves and tomatoes. At first, when i saw them I was too naive thinking they are cute so I left them enjoying my basils. After a week or so I had no idea where they were from but I found so many. I decide to take them by hand, then rinse the basil plants with water to remove them. Eventually, I couldn't win so I had to chop off my basils. Still don't know how to chase them away but this year I will make sure to remove them asap.

Hello friends I tell you that in the comments challenge I told you about my sunflower plants, they are growing and soon will be born .I first flower, but in recent days I do not know if by the rains there are snails, these I can finish them, but now came out a kind of very hairy black worms, I do not know how to remove them, thank God has not fallen to all plants but multiply very fast.

Years past it was the dreaded Colorado potato beetle,whom I would capture and rehome. Went most of the year without one, but by the time they appeared I had a bigger problem. The deer bit off all the tops off my greenbeans and potatoes [which I haven't planted in years]-and ripped a big limb off a new [golden delicious] apple tree relative to its size [I tried rooting hormones to try to grow some cuttings from the limb, but no luck getting a new tree out of it]. I put up a home made fence around the garden and they still got to them, so I pretty much stopped caring about the garden after that.

With the price of meat, I doubt the deer will make it past hunting season. 8(

Tried the zip lock bag trick again this year on the apple trees to keep out plum curculios, but appears I bagged them too late or they still got in the baggy anyways. Also the blue jays started to peck through the ziplock baggies to eat the apples, including my lone cortland on a 3 y/o tree.

I can't really say, other than apples [and soon peaches], I presently have an insect pest problem. Alphids got my brocolli pretty bad in the past, so I stopped growing them. After squash bugs attacked my curcrubites years ago I stopped growing them, aside from some cucumbers after a year off. Rose Chafers got my neighbor's new cherry tree pretty good this year, til finally I put some plastic baggies (didn't have netting available) on the ends to protect the new foilage...but that might have done more harm than good.

I am curious about trying the brix number thing next year, but I don't really want to store things like manganese chelate or other redox chemicals around our house per reason of pets.

video source:Advancing Eco Agriculture,

No pests when you've got your own predators! Though I'm lucky that we don't suffer from Rabbits or Cane Toads!

Check out this post about seeing things a little differently from a more ecological perspective that you can apply to pests as well as butterflies.

There are certain pests that can be combated by building fences (animals in general), nets (especially for birds, in Europe they cover the tops of fruit trees to prevent birds from pecking at the fruit), greenhouses, etc.

The results are usually quite acceptable.

I don't have this problem because my garden and my orchard are perfectly closed, the only animals that can give me some annoyance are the cats which are impossible to control since they move on roofs, rooftops, walls, etc. without any difficulty. But they do not change too much damage. They only leave their droppings in the middle of the vegetables and that makes it necessary to wash them very carefully, especially when they are eaten raw.

My problem is another as you can see in the photo: it is the white or cottony mealybug of the fruit trees. That not only attacks the leaves but also the fruit of citrus especially. They even favor the arrival of small ants that feed on them, contributing to further weaken the plant because then the ants follow their path and attack the rest of the plant.

This year I have managed to control this pest with an energetic pruning. The orange and tangerine trees are already blooming. Let's see how this story ends in a few months. For now, the white mealybug and the ants are gone.

Greetings to all who participate in these very elaborate comments. I am learning many new things.

Every morning we check on our little garden and we always find out that the leaves are almost half and others have design. We always wonder who did it because we cannot find anything. One day, my husband saw one grasshopper and we thought it is the one eating the leaves. At night we also checked and found out a snail enjoying in our garden. We picked it up and removed it from our garden.

The time we harvested our pechay and raddish then we fount that things in the picture. It is the one eating those green leaves. Fun thing, my husband is a little bit afraid of it so I am the one who get and even hold it. Glad I still have that picture and i have something to attached here.

Here's the bugger that kept attacking my roses.

Aaaahhhhh: this is SUCH a fascinating subject - and thread.... I could ramble on here for hours, but will try to be concise... I come from a climate (S. W. Scotland) where slugs, snails and aphids eat all plants, and midges, clegs and mosquitoes eat all humans. Even this particularly harsh year for biting insects in Italy doesn't come close ... So my general feeling, being outside of Scotland, is that most things are tolerable/ managable.
Since studying permaculture, biodynamics, lunar cycles and the like - I started to wake up/ have more confidence in, my holistic instinct about insect life. My sense is that insects are simply an expression of our collective conscious + our interrelationship with Gaia Sophia: anything 'proliferating' and/ or 'inconvenient' for us humans as we insert ourselves into natural ecosystems, is a symptom of soil, immediate environment and the elements. So there are limitations tobthe usefulness of our interfering - in the same way that our human health depends on our capacity to find equilibrium with our environment and relationships.
The most efficacious 'medicine' I've used, on a particularly dis-eased lemon tree outside my house, is soapy water. Organic soap mixed wuth tapwater, in a pump sprayer. I've had incredible success in balancing out multiple issues of stress-related funghi and then aphids , ants and other insects that have joined in the dynamic work of bringing the tree back to the earth... The tree feels more cared for, and has had a lot of offerings and good vibes gifted to it, and a very necessary blanket in winter. 😍🌞💐
My plant, seed, cuttings choices tend to be local, hardy, in-season type things - and I would never plant on bare soil or in rows or unnatural layering. I know that a good biodiversity and complex layering, companion planting, optimising microclimates, etc, is essential to not having pest problems 🙏🌈💚🌍🥰

These are the worse pests these imported brown snails that bothers everybody's garden here. We don't mind if they eat leaves or flowers or fruits. but they left the slim all over the plants that are disgusting. After the rain, they are all over even on the roads, and forest. But thanks to the hedgehog living in our garden helping us to protect our plants.