these are asian or japanese beetles, very terrible pest, search plant eating japanese beetles for info... very destructive they come from grubs, only out late at night, see them eat with flashlight, knock into pan of soapy water to kill, best to kill there larva now to august or they will return with a vengeance. these are a little known pest eating all trees and vegetation all over the US. They LOVE mint, peppers, thyme, most herbs, spices, sunflowers...dont eat tomatos for some reason...if you see little green "grasshoppers"? DONT KILL THEM, they are baby praying mantises there to eat your beetles, they are your best friends... best of luck, Steve

Grrr - earwigs! Some of my clematis are being decimated along with coneflowers, buddlia, daisy, lamium and others. I'm not sure if the lamium and the buddlia can take much more. Most of the leaves are so full of holes there is little left of them. The situation is so bad that there were baby earwigs on the daisys last evening at 7 pm! I spray them with hort oil, which suffocates them. I also dusted with diatomatious earth last evening, but it washes away when I water. My garden is starting to look ragged already and it's only the middle of June :-( I hate using pesticides, but I'm getting tempted to have the area sprayed under my deck, which is a prime hiding spot for earwigs and the source of most of my problems. There are trapping methods you can use, but my skin was crawling last night when I was watering the pots and earwigs were falling and crawling everywhere. A horror movie in my own backyard.

Hello folks - thanks for shedding some light on this - if anything it makes me relieved to hear bugs may not be at play so I dont have to worry about stuff breeding etc lol. I dont think Clemson does soil testing here, but I heard something local from someone at work which I will follow up on. The sun has been the same every spring/ summer - no change there. We moved here 2 years ago during fall - they were growing fine then. Next summer I may not have watered them enough as I saw burn spots on the hydrangea leaves and some of them were big patches. Following fall I hired someone for some yard work and they said our hydrangeas/ rose etc. had grown a lot and needed trimming so they went ahead and trimmed everything to 2-3 feet. The spring after (this year) - these guys esp the hydrangeas have been growing like crazy with less flower output than last year. I have also been watering more regularly - although there are still some burn spots - not as bad as last summer. So that's about all the history I know about these guys ;-) Btw - I m worried the pyroligneous acid will kill useful soil bacteria/ bugs as well. And doesn't it go against the theory that bugs are not at play here? Thanks.

I had two seasons in a row where I had a very bad earwig problem. Everything was being eaten and I couldn't see what was doing it. Someone on GW suggested I go out at night with a flashlight and sure enough, I discovered the earwigs. I used a cup of soapy water and just knocked them into the cup. I did that every night as often as I could for a few weeks and got them under control. Pulled off the chewed leaves and the plants went on to produce another crop of leaves. They loved basil among other things. I kept the plants watered and fertilized with Neptune's Harvest half strength weekly. I haven't had a problem with earwigs in at least 5 years now, so things do improve over time. I grow in a neighborhood that is more urban/suburban than rural, so maybe we have less to deal with. No deer, few rabbits, a mole or a chipmunk once in awhile, and two years we had a groundhog that stripped the vegetable garden among other things, in a couple of nights. Lucky you have a cat that will catch moles. My dog sniffs them out when they are around, but is more curious than killer. [g] Some years I get aphids but I let them go since I noticed that when I ignored them, they attracted ladybugs who took care of them in a blink of an eye. Last year I had a lot of cabbage flies laying eggs on my brassicas, and then I noticed I had yellow jackets flying all around the vegetable garden and no more cabbage worms. So, if you have a new garden in a new location, I would encourage you to try to go with the flow. Learn about what is destroying your plants and what natural predator you can enlist to help you. Sometimes all you have to do is just let it work itself out. Sometimes hand picking is needed. I get oriental beetles in small amounts and I pick those off. If things are really in jeopardy - I mix up hot pepper, garlic and a few drops of soap, strain that through cheesecloth and put it in a spray bottle and that has helped in a lot of situations. I've been trying to grow sunflowers and the squirrels drove me crazy last year. I tried covering the seedling area with hardware cloth, but as soon as I removed it they showed up and pulled 6" tall seedlings right out of the ground. I tried a couple of other things and resowed the seed 3x. By then I was determined to beat them, and I decided to try ground cayenne pepper. I sprinkled it around the edges of the bed. Watered the seedlings and sprinkled it on the leaves of the sunflowers and that was the end of the squirrels bothering them. I did the same thing this year and had success without having to resow three times. But I'm going through very large bottles of cayenne pepper powder, pretty fast. [g] I replace it after rain. I did get lazy once a couple of the sunflowers reached about 2ft tall and sure enough, I came out Friday morning to one very healthy pretty sunflower plant broken off just about at ground level. So, it's back to coating everything with red cayenne pepper religiously. :-) It does feel like a battle…lol.