2025 Garden Pests and Disease

Notes to track various pests and pathogens and their treatment. This includes insects, disease and critters.

Months	First Sighting	Pest/ Pathogen	Crop	Prevention /Treatment	Signs/ Comments
May	none	Leaf minor	Spinach & beets	row cover with blue sticky trap	successfully prevented it
June-		Cabbage worms	Cabbage	Hand removal (multiple passes each week)	Frass, holes in leaves
July-Aug	7/12 – brussels 7/12 – nasturtiums 7/12 – dino kale 8/9 – curly kale	Aphids	Brussels, nasturtiums, dinosaur kale, curly kale	Insecticidal soap; don’t use on fava beans, damages the blossoms
July-Aug	7/12	Mediterranean fruit fly?	Peppers	Spray neem in evenings	Maggots eating fruit from the inside; tiny dots on outside of pepper
Jul-Aug	7/2	Squash vine borer eggs	Summer squash, pumpkins, red kuri, mambo, cucumbers, honeynut	Remove eggs with packing tape	small red-ish brown spheres on stems and leaves
Jul-Aug	7/19 – mambo,red kuri, dunja	Squash vine borer larvae	Red kuri, mambo, pumpkin, zucchini	Surgery (small cut in vine where frass is found, sharp tweezers to remove borer)
July-Aug	7/26	Squash bug eggs	Winter squash (red kuri, mambo)	Hand remove eggs and bugs	clusters of amber spheres
Jul	7/9	Black spot	Tomatoes	Serenade fungicide	black spots on tomato leaves
Aug	8/3	Rodent?	tomato	half-eaten ripe tomato	cover developing fruit with fabric bags
		Cucumber beetle		?
Aug-Sep	8/10	Powdery Mildew	Squashes, jerusalem artichokes, sunflower	Spray with Serenade	White coating on leaves
Jul-Aug	mid Jul?	Rust?	Bush Beans	none	Discolored leaves and loss of foliage; try fungicide next year?

Notes on squashes

• 7/12 – First frass from SVBs found on several plants. Surgery on 3-4 where frass was fresh and sprayed the cut with BT afterwards.
• 7/12 – started spraying leaves with Serenade, a fungicide to prevent powdery mildew
• 7/16 – spray Serenade
• 7/19 – spray Serenade
• 7/26 – clusters of squash bug eggs on the winter squash leaves (underneath). They look like tiny amber beads.
• 7/26 – spray Serenade
• 8/2 – spray Serenade; early signs of powdery mildew on pumpkins
• 8/9 – One mambo and one red kuri plant died from SVBs (these plants had surgery the first week and never fully recovered). The two plants each survived long enough to yield a mature squash. Harvested 2 mature red kuri.
• 8/9 – Possible squash bug damage with leaf wilt – no signs of frass, but clear damage to stem and some black residue.
• 8/9 – spray Serenade; starting to see powdery mildew on some leaves
• 8/17 – another mambo plant died from the SVB damage. Yielded one small but mature mambo
• 8/17 – spray Serenade; powdery mildew on a number of plants
• 8/23 – spray Serenade; trimmed mildewed leaves. Cleared one dead mambo plant. No new signs of SVB damage, but more squash bug eggs

Notes on Peppers

• 7/18 – insect app identified a fly on the peppers as a Mediterranean fruit fly. Possible that the damage to the peppers is from the larvae of these flies? Placed a yellow stick trap near sweet peppers

Notes on Brassicas

• Aphids found on tops of brussels sprouts in July. Spray with insecticidal soap and topped the plants (along with most of the aphids, which colonize in the new top growth, in early August)
• Cabbage worms in the cabbages. Maybe try row cloth to reduce eggs?

Notes on Tomatoes

• Signs of black spots on tomato leaves. Started spraying tomatoes with Serenade (organic fungicide) once per week
• 7/12 – started spraying leaves with Serenade, a fungicide to help combat black spots on leaves
• 7/16 – spray Serenade
• 7/19 – spray Serenade
• 7/26 – spray Serenade
• 8/2 – spray Serenade; three plants succumbing to some sort of disease (green zebra and 2 others)
• 8/16 – critter chewed through a bag to eat one ripe tomato. However, the vast majority of ripe tomatoes that were bagged have been untouched by critters.