One of the most frustrating things to find in your yard in O’Fallon, IL is the plants in your yard having holes in them. These holes cause damage to your plants and can kill them. The holes themselves, thankfully, leave evidence of what kind of pest is to blame for the holes. Here we want to go into detail on some pests that can leave holes in your plants.
Caterpillars
Caterpillars might be one of the most fondly known culprits, but that does not make these insects any more annoying when they eat through your garden. Well, all know that caterpillars will feed off of vegetation until they can metamorphose into a butterfly or a moth. Some caterpillars can be nocturnal, but you might find caterpillars eating your plants at any point in the day. The holes these insects leave can vary in size but have rough edges appearing at either the edges or center of a leaf. There might even be some fecal droppings left behind by the caterpillars.
Snails and Slugs
Common culprits for eating holes through the plants in your yard in O’Fallon, IL are snails and slugs. These animals can ravage gardens once they get into them. If you believe that these pests might be eating your plants, try going out to your plants at night and inspecting them with a flashlight. They will chew on a variety of different plans and you can sometimes tell it is them by how they leave large smooth-edged holes in the center of leaves you may even find their slime from where they were slithering.
Sucking Pests
There are many insects out there that have specialized mouthparts meant to such in their nutrients like squash bugs for example There are a couple of different kinds of sucking pests, including piercing-sucking pests who pierce through leaves to suck the sap out with their tube-shaped mouths and rasping-sucking pests that scrape the surface of leaves to suck out plant juices. You can tell that sucking insects are to blame if you see that the damage focuses on new growths, when the leaves have seeping yellow spots, or when they have become completely discolored.
These are not the only pests that can attack your plants in your O’Fallon, IL yard. If you are looking for a pest control company that can find and rid your yard of these pests to keep your plants protected, give our team at IMEL Pest Control a call today!
