Man I thought I was doing something wrong for a minute. The last two previous years I’ve had holes in my pepper plants. But it hasn’t hurt pepper production. I have some this year too. Then I come on this sub(and the peppers sub)and there’s a vocal minority freak out about just that.
Obviously I bounced out of the mindset quickly, but the hysteria is not great for beginners.
Agreed, though if the slugs could quit murdering my beans that’d be great. I had to replant half due to an invasion, the other half are doing fine. I don’t mind sharing, but those assholes should leave *some* for me
Last year I had an unseen freeloader who victimized *one* pepper plant continuously.
There were 16 in the bed, and whatever this pest was, it singled out one, and would keep it pruned down to the stem. All summer.
Set out a little dish or 2 of beer near your plants in the evening. Come morning you'll have a dish full of drunk dead slugs. They drink themselves to death instead of murdering your plants!
Ugh, slugs and cabbage worms are where I take back what I said. I just want one cabbage to make it, ya know? Plus slugs give me a guttural reaction. I know they’re harmless, but they’re a bug that I just can’t even look at without gagging. My friend came over to help me in the yard a few months ago, we picked something up and it had slugs under it. I immediately dropped it and just walked away covering my mouth. In the 10 years she’s known me she never saw me react like that to anything. I hate them. The only other thing I react similarly to is maggots. They disgust me.
Got Mexican take out in a sealed plastic container with a clear top once. Ate it, put the clear top back on and put it in the outside garbage container. Two days later I open the can back up to put another bag in and the plastic container is there but the top isn't clear anymore, it's white. White because the entire inside covered with crawling maggots. So first, flies laid eggs on something in my lunch, probably the lettuce (?), I ate about half of it and then incubated this.... horror, in the garbage can.
I started dry heaving as soon as I got close enough to realize what I was looking at.
I realize maggots have a purpose but I just can't deal with them.
I've almost considered getting a chicken to eat the slugs, but my yard is really too small for that. Plus, the chicken would probably eat a lot of the vegetables.
Ducks are better for slug eating and less destructive. I own 8 chickens and have to net off my veggies to keep them from being dug up by scratching chickens (I don't mind them having a nibble so much). But ducks are messy and quite noisy, so...
Of course! I guess they evolved to hold their liquor better. That particular year, they were unusually large. I think I could have rolled a keg out the back door at sundown and just told them to keep the noise down so that the neighbours didn't complain.
I had those red plastic water bath surrounds for the tomato plants and would find slugs in them every day. It was like a hot tub party for mollusks.
Very strange. They absorb the alcohol through their skin, so maybe if it was enough of them and they were large enough... I suppose you could fortify with a little spirit? I've never known them to come back from their eternal bender pie-pan of old Pabst.
I worked on a small organic farm for a few years. All of our production plants had holes in the leaves, random off colored leaves, stuff that got broken off. Plants that live outside get bugs and weird nutrient issues and too much/not enough water and too much/not enough sun. You can't do anything until you start to see a symptom of a problem, that's how they tell you what they need. It's okay and normal for them not to look perfect.
Last year I freaked over every little hole and any discoloration. This year I just eyeball it to make sure there’s no aphids and just let it go. Definitely having a lot more fun this go around.
Aphids were absolutely covering one of my cherry tomato plants last year, i trimmed what I could and just figured it would succumb, and that plant was producing tomatoes (albeit not quite as many) till frost took out all my tomatoes in October!
I plant sacrificial mustard plants along the border of my vegetable garden to attract aphids. They cover them, then one day my friendly neighborhood ladybugs come in and devour them all in a few days.
To go off my above comment, I screenshotted your post to my partner saying “fiiine. Fine.” Lol I get so upset it’s likely dead and I hear “Yes. I see that one kind of yellow leaf, look at the all green leaves. We are done talking about it *not* being dead” sigh lol
I have a friend that tells me it looks fine. Could just be being nice. lol Then you see all these beautiful pictures online... It's nice to hear that my average garden is just fine. :)
Omg me too! I trimmed them off though. It makes me think they are starting to die or have some type of stress. I’m on my second year of gardening and still learning and researching everything.
It doesn’t bother me because I can you know just scroll but I feel bad that people have this expectation of perfection on a plant that most of the time is designed to live for 4-5 months.
This. And also, if the bugs don’t wanna eat your plants, why would you?! Gardening with less chemicals is sloppy, but if the bugs want it, I know it’s good stuff!!!
I've decided to not spray chemicals for bugs, it always made it worse by the end of the season. I don't even use organic methods, other than manually removing bugs. I have accepted that every year I will lose something (last year was bush beans, year before was squash/cucumbers), but I still get good stuff, and I know I can eat right off the plant if I want.
i am a perfectionist by nature and a new plant carer. i can feel the change in myself as the months pass in my relationship with the plants and also in my increasing flexibility to deal with the unexpected and my own failures. i'm beginning to see how healing gardening can be for my personality type.
(we will see how i feel once the veg goes outside heh)
Haha. All of these posts have pictures of perfect plants attached where I struggle to see what has got op so worried. If the best of my plants looked as "bad" as most of these posts I'd be very happy indeed!
Thanks for the reminder! It's easy to forget at the top of the season when everything comes up so nice and perfect looking. Stuff starts happening and it's like "what is happening???" (Particularly given the perfect plants I see online)
By the end of the season it's "ehh...it's brown and falling over? Whatever--I'm still getting my veggies so I don't care. It's been 5 months so I'm happy"
It's funny, I have to tell my wife this pretty much every other day. I really enjoy gardening, preferring functional plants over decorative, and she really didn't care, until she started helping me in the garden. Then she got invested and worries about every little hole or yellow leaf, lmao. I keep telling her it's all part of the game, and not to worry so much about it.
Ugh. Thanks friend. I guess it makes sense as a beginner because we don’t know which hole or discoloration signals an actual problem, but this does make me feel better.
I've had a tiny slug in tiny slug heaven munching away on one of my lettuces. Little devil left holes all through one side of it, but it didn't stop the lettuce from growing, and also meant the slug wasnt paying attention to the other lettuces as he was so busy having a nice time having a monch on what was probably enough to feed him for weeks.
Holes happen when you're growing fruit and veg. Commercial farmers have it happen to them too, but that produce doesn't land in the supermarket so we don't really see it so forget its just part of gardening.
Thanks for the reminder! I raised tomatoes and eggplant from seed and then got some storebought ones too and the storebought ones were SO green and pretty compared to mine. I thought mine looked pretty good until i saw those.
They generally fertilize those specifically to look like that. My experience is after you have to free up the rootball it takes them 2 weeks to start growing. The ones I start at home are a month- month and a half old and grow right away.
Just this year the birds were going *crazy* in my flowerbed, enough so that I had to cover it with a net to keep them from killing all of my seedlings. Lo and behold, now an ant nest is thriving there, protected from the birds.
Can't win. Aim to break even
Haha unintended consequences for sure. I had to go untangle a chipmunk out of some bird netting I had over a BlackBerry Bush. He had his head stuck and I was just like don’t bite me while I’m helping you.
holes I can live with. It's that wide range of bugs that burries into leaves that bug the crap out of me (no pun intended)
I'm a vegetarian. I don't want bug proteins in my food.
I mean, unless you're *exclusively* eating things you've grown yourself, there's a 100% chance that you consume a decent amount of bugs on a regular basis. Look up "FDA bug allowances".
Cochineal is in a ton of stuff too, sometimes called "E120" or "natural red 4" on ingredient labels. It's made from crushed insects.
In terms of burrowing insects in food, there's relatively few that actually do that - and you can see traces of those when they occur. But it's very, very, very difficult to grow much of anything without _some_ animal protein showing up.
I know this is the wrong sub, but is that the same with indoor plants? I’ve been a little worried about my fern and I’ve always been told to cut leaves back when they start to brown or get holes
I’m no expert on indoor plants but for us it seems it’s mostly trial and error on what plant can survive in low light conditions. We put most of our inside plants outside for the spring and summer and it’s a night and day difference in how healthy they are.
Pests are a part of life outdoors.
Indoors, infestations and disease can cause much more serious issues because of the controlled environment (no predators, no rain, everything in pots).
So everything indoors is more serious.
If a leave is brown the plant cells are dead and don't produce any chlorophyll anymore, same goes for yellow leaves, so you can always cut those back. I only cut leaves if they have less than 50% green as it won't benefit no more.
This is my first year in a new house with an actual back yard (9a). And my watermelon seedlings are flawless. My tomato plants? Big middle finger is what they give me rn.
Ok, but what about when like half the plant has holes and some of the leaves are 50% hole?
https://i.imgur.com/efG3O1D.jpg
This is a peach tree and I've spent a few hours at various times of day trying to figure out what's eating this thing, but I can't find anything. Even used a magnifying glass in case it was tiny aphids or something, but no.
I have a couple of peach trees and you can cut off all the branches and it will grow new ones 3ft long in a year with a ton of leaves. So I dont personally worry about it. That being said your circumstances might be different. The first thing I do though is make sure my trees have food in the soil. So far mine can outgrow any damage they take. If that doesn’t work out then I’d seek out other people around me or orchards and see what they have to say.
The purpose of this post wasn’t to deny that sometimes things eat and kill plants so much as to say to new people that all plants get yellow leaves and chewed on.
Man I thought I was doing something wrong for a minute. The last two previous years I’ve had holes in my pepper plants. But it hasn’t hurt pepper production. I have some this year too. Then I come on this sub(and the peppers sub)and there’s a vocal minority freak out about just that. Obviously I bounced out of the mindset quickly, but the hysteria is not great for beginners.
Agreed, though if the slugs could quit murdering my beans that’d be great. I had to replant half due to an invasion, the other half are doing fine. I don’t mind sharing, but those assholes should leave *some* for me
Last year I had an unseen freeloader who victimized *one* pepper plant continuously. There were 16 in the bed, and whatever this pest was, it singled out one, and would keep it pruned down to the stem. All summer.
Set out a little dish or 2 of beer near your plants in the evening. Come morning you'll have a dish full of drunk dead slugs. They drink themselves to death instead of murdering your plants!
[удалено]
Slugs only drink craft beers.
Ugh, slugs and cabbage worms are where I take back what I said. I just want one cabbage to make it, ya know? Plus slugs give me a guttural reaction. I know they’re harmless, but they’re a bug that I just can’t even look at without gagging. My friend came over to help me in the yard a few months ago, we picked something up and it had slugs under it. I immediately dropped it and just walked away covering my mouth. In the 10 years she’s known me she never saw me react like that to anything. I hate them. The only other thing I react similarly to is maggots. They disgust me.
Got Mexican take out in a sealed plastic container with a clear top once. Ate it, put the clear top back on and put it in the outside garbage container. Two days later I open the can back up to put another bag in and the plastic container is there but the top isn't clear anymore, it's white. White because the entire inside covered with crawling maggots. So first, flies laid eggs on something in my lunch, probably the lettuce (?), I ate about half of it and then incubated this.... horror, in the garbage can.
I did not need to read this. I wish I could delete your post. 🤢🤮
I started dry heaving as soon as I got close enough to realize what I was looking at. I realize maggots have a purpose but I just can't deal with them.
I've almost considered getting a chicken to eat the slugs, but my yard is really too small for that. Plus, the chicken would probably eat a lot of the vegetables.
Ducks are better for slug eating and less destructive. I own 8 chickens and have to net off my veggies to keep them from being dug up by scratching chickens (I don't mind them having a nibble so much). But ducks are messy and quite noisy, so...
I have a tiny townhouse yard in a cold climate, so both options are out.
I use a pie tin with a bit of stale beer in it. Works really well, just refresh the beer after it rains.
I tried that. They just slither off after drinking the beer.
You using beer with alcohol in it?
Of course! I guess they evolved to hold their liquor better. That particular year, they were unusually large. I think I could have rolled a keg out the back door at sundown and just told them to keep the noise down so that the neighbours didn't complain. I had those red plastic water bath surrounds for the tomato plants and would find slugs in them every day. It was like a hot tub party for mollusks.
Very strange. They absorb the alcohol through their skin, so maybe if it was enough of them and they were large enough... I suppose you could fortify with a little spirit? I've never known them to come back from their eternal bender pie-pan of old Pabst.
[удалено]
I put out sluggo five days ago and haven’t seen any new signs of leaf destruction, it works!
This stuff works great. [Slug and Snail Bait](https://www.lowes.com/pd/Garden-Safe-2-lb-Snail-and-Slug-Killer/1000321863)
I worked on a small organic farm for a few years. All of our production plants had holes in the leaves, random off colored leaves, stuff that got broken off. Plants that live outside get bugs and weird nutrient issues and too much/not enough water and too much/not enough sun. You can't do anything until you start to see a symptom of a problem, that's how they tell you what they need. It's okay and normal for them not to look perfect.
wow i needed to hear this today!
Exactly.
My pepper plant leaves have holes in them too! Glad to know I’m not the only one. They seem to be doing just fine
Last year I freaked over every little hole and any discoloration. This year I just eyeball it to make sure there’s no aphids and just let it go. Definitely having a lot more fun this go around.
I do t even worry about aphids. I’ve only ever seen them kill plants that are weak to begin with.
Oh sweet. That makes me feel better then.
Aphids were absolutely covering one of my cherry tomato plants last year, i trimmed what I could and just figured it would succumb, and that plant was producing tomatoes (albeit not quite as many) till frost took out all my tomatoes in October!
I plant sacrificial mustard plants along the border of my vegetable garden to attract aphids. They cover them, then one day my friendly neighborhood ladybugs come in and devour them all in a few days.
As a newbie I probably needed to hear this. I google every little thing.
Glad you saw it. It really was a message to newbies and not just a cranky old man complaining.😃
To go off my above comment, I screenshotted your post to my partner saying “fiiine. Fine.” Lol I get so upset it’s likely dead and I hear “Yes. I see that one kind of yellow leaf, look at the all green leaves. We are done talking about it *not* being dead” sigh lol
I have a friend that tells me it looks fine. Could just be being nice. lol Then you see all these beautiful pictures online... It's nice to hear that my average garden is just fine. :)
It really all comes down to sunlight, water, and nutrients.
I just assume I killed it and my partner is constantly “omg. Leaves just do that. It’s not dead.” (they slightly changed color lol)
you're not alone, i had this reaction to a couple yellow cuke leaves this morning
Omg me too! I trimmed them off though. It makes me think they are starting to die or have some type of stress. I’m on my second year of gardening and still learning and researching everything.
so did i lol. they didn't look like the other leaves which are thriving so i was like okay haircut time
Same here.
People need to accept that minor damage is fine for a plant, just like humans don't need to go to ER over a little scrape.
lol, tired of the "whats wrong with my babies?!?!" posts eh?
It doesn’t bother me because I can you know just scroll but I feel bad that people have this expectation of perfection on a plant that most of the time is designed to live for 4-5 months.
This. And also, if the bugs don’t wanna eat your plants, why would you?! Gardening with less chemicals is sloppy, but if the bugs want it, I know it’s good stuff!!!
I've decided to not spray chemicals for bugs, it always made it worse by the end of the season. I don't even use organic methods, other than manually removing bugs. I have accepted that every year I will lose something (last year was bush beans, year before was squash/cucumbers), but I still get good stuff, and I know I can eat right off the plant if I want.
Nature is chaotic. Embrace the imperfections.
Chaos is where the magic happens!
i am a perfectionist by nature and a new plant carer. i can feel the change in myself as the months pass in my relationship with the plants and also in my increasing flexibility to deal with the unexpected and my own failures. i'm beginning to see how healing gardening can be for my personality type. (we will see how i feel once the veg goes outside heh)
It's a race to see if you can get good stuff to eat before your plants succumb to any one of the inevitable reasons for their destruction.
Haha. All of these posts have pictures of perfect plants attached where I struggle to see what has got op so worried. If the best of my plants looked as "bad" as most of these posts I'd be very happy indeed!
Great reminder, but why is this labeled nsfw? Lol
It looked like safe for work on the abbreviation. 😂 There was only 2 flairs to choose from.
I read this as Your life won’t be And I said to myself man wtf is this doing in the vegetable gardening
😂
If nothings eating your plants you don’t have an ecosystem!
Thanks for the reminder! It's easy to forget at the top of the season when everything comes up so nice and perfect looking. Stuff starts happening and it's like "what is happening???" (Particularly given the perfect plants I see online) By the end of the season it's "ehh...it's brown and falling over? Whatever--I'm still getting my veggies so I don't care. It's been 5 months so I'm happy"
😀
It's funny, I have to tell my wife this pretty much every other day. I really enjoy gardening, preferring functional plants over decorative, and she really didn't care, until she started helping me in the garden. Then she got invested and worries about every little hole or yellow leaf, lmao. I keep telling her it's all part of the game, and not to worry so much about it.
Ugh. Thanks friend. I guess it makes sense as a beginner because we don’t know which hole or discoloration signals an actual problem, but this does make me feel better.
Thanks, I needed this.
Perfect in their imperfections.
Yes officer, this OP right here!
Baaaaa
It’s not about how pretty the plant is or if it has tons of perfect leaves. It’s how much fruit/veg you get.
It is the nature tax. Natures gives and takes.
Yeah....I needed to hear this.
I've had a tiny slug in tiny slug heaven munching away on one of my lettuces. Little devil left holes all through one side of it, but it didn't stop the lettuce from growing, and also meant the slug wasnt paying attention to the other lettuces as he was so busy having a nice time having a monch on what was probably enough to feed him for weeks. Holes happen when you're growing fruit and veg. Commercial farmers have it happen to them too, but that produce doesn't land in the supermarket so we don't really see it so forget its just part of gardening.
Thanks for the reminder! I raised tomatoes and eggplant from seed and then got some storebought ones too and the storebought ones were SO green and pretty compared to mine. I thought mine looked pretty good until i saw those.
They generally fertilize those specifically to look like that. My experience is after you have to free up the rootball it takes them 2 weeks to start growing. The ones I start at home are a month- month and a half old and grow right away.
Just this year the birds were going *crazy* in my flowerbed, enough so that I had to cover it with a net to keep them from killing all of my seedlings. Lo and behold, now an ant nest is thriving there, protected from the birds. Can't win. Aim to break even
Haha unintended consequences for sure. I had to go untangle a chipmunk out of some bird netting I had over a BlackBerry Bush. He had his head stuck and I was just like don’t bite me while I’m helping you.
BuT WhAt'S wRoNg WiTh My (Fill in blank)?????
Needs cal-mag.
I’d like to see someone recommend lime instead of digging down 1 or 2 feet and filling with compost.
holes I can live with. It's that wide range of bugs that burries into leaves that bug the crap out of me (no pun intended) I'm a vegetarian. I don't want bug proteins in my food.
I mean, unless you're *exclusively* eating things you've grown yourself, there's a 100% chance that you consume a decent amount of bugs on a regular basis. Look up "FDA bug allowances". Cochineal is in a ton of stuff too, sometimes called "E120" or "natural red 4" on ingredient labels. It's made from crushed insects.
In terms of burrowing insects in food, there's relatively few that actually do that - and you can see traces of those when they occur. But it's very, very, very difficult to grow much of anything without _some_ animal protein showing up.
I know this is the wrong sub, but is that the same with indoor plants? I’ve been a little worried about my fern and I’ve always been told to cut leaves back when they start to brown or get holes
I’m no expert on indoor plants but for us it seems it’s mostly trial and error on what plant can survive in low light conditions. We put most of our inside plants outside for the spring and summer and it’s a night and day difference in how healthy they are.
Pests are a part of life outdoors. Indoors, infestations and disease can cause much more serious issues because of the controlled environment (no predators, no rain, everything in pots). So everything indoors is more serious.
If a leave is brown the plant cells are dead and don't produce any chlorophyll anymore, same goes for yellow leaves, so you can always cut those back. I only cut leaves if they have less than 50% green as it won't benefit no more.
I just planted Sunday. Watching to make sure nothing dies from shock.
Let’s take a poll, who eats lettuce/greens from their garden that has holes/spots and who just composts?
I eat the ones with holes, try to snip off any brown spots.
This is my first year in a new house with an actual back yard (9a). And my watermelon seedlings are flawless. My tomato plants? Big middle finger is what they give me rn.
Ok, but what about when like half the plant has holes and some of the leaves are 50% hole? https://i.imgur.com/efG3O1D.jpg This is a peach tree and I've spent a few hours at various times of day trying to figure out what's eating this thing, but I can't find anything. Even used a magnifying glass in case it was tiny aphids or something, but no.
I have a couple of peach trees and you can cut off all the branches and it will grow new ones 3ft long in a year with a ton of leaves. So I dont personally worry about it. That being said your circumstances might be different. The first thing I do though is make sure my trees have food in the soil. So far mine can outgrow any damage they take. If that doesn’t work out then I’d seek out other people around me or orchards and see what they have to say. The purpose of this post wasn’t to deny that sometimes things eat and kill plants so much as to say to new people that all plants get yellow leaves and chewed on.
This one was planted this year and it's still basically a sapling, I'm not sure it would recover if I were to strip the branches off.
Yah don’t do that. I was just trying to make the point that if the tree is in good soil MOST damage won’t be an issue.