Pests, Diseases and Cures

The slug pellets won’t eradicate all munches - there’s always one that finds a gap, or was hiding under the plant.

We sprayed in early spring for diseases. But, unfortunately, it still happened. Well, I'll just wait until we harvest the crops

Lupins are legumes. The newly planted may not yet be innoculated with the necessary microbes and therefore not receiving the same nitrogen that the older established plants are capturing. I suggest that you foliar feed it, using rain water not chlorinated tap water .It may also still be under...

Never lost any abroad, opposite in fact having to control the weed. Here 2 year back I lost a very healthy plant 1m across. I put this down to the cold winter, but wonder now if it was the wet (despite it being very well drained). I now take 2-3 cuttings each year just in case. Fortunately I had...

I use copper rings around my beans, yes it works, but only to cut down the numbers. I suspect some must ignore and inconvenience/pain and others are either inside the ring or dig under them.

It looks like Botrytis blight which Oriental poppies can suffer from in wet summers. They can also suffer from downy mildew, I know Beth Chatto stopped selling them because of this.

Snails and slugs love Doom Bar in my beer traps. Brings a tear to my eye as I pour it into my jam jar trap.

Apparently there is some sort of disease which means the plants can't take up water as the stems get blocked. The plant looks fine and flourishing ... and then suddenly it just wilts.

Unfortunately, rabbits will have a go at many things initially, even if they then decide they don't like something, and subsequently leave it alone. There's not much you can do. For trees and shrubs, it's the caging around them until they get mature enough. For anything else, it's often trial...

Ah, I wonder if it is oak caterpillar defoliating my flowering cherry. The canopies of the two touch. It is the first yr I've had a problem.

No remnants of webbing that I can see. Your thoughts echo my own, that disease might have been transferred. I think I will copy your example and invest in a battery hedge trimmer. Thank you for your advice.

We have a regular hedgehog visiting our garden, sometimes more than one. We have seen up to five in previous years. They come onto the patio to drink from a small clay saucer which the local slugs also seem to like. We sometimes have up to 20 small slugs on the patio after rain and we have...

I don’t suppose been regularly hammered helps but the front branches look very bare. Viburnum is tough so although I wouldn’t expect it to look it’s best am not sure I would expect such a large bare patch. It may be all these front branches have actually snapped and so all the front growth has...

They look suspiciously like Ceanothus. Notoriously temperamental! Scrape the bark mulch away from the trunks, give them a balanced feed and snip out all the brown twigs. They might come back, they might not.

I was trying to find a pic of an egregiously neglected bay tree. Not quite as bad as yours, but close. I can only find the 'after'. With a bit of TLC it is doing well. It needs a bit of a prune, but I'll get around to it.

Perhaps the roots are still alive and kicking and using up all the water and nutrients. Our tree man used a stump grinder to destroy everything.

Here they are, vicious little monsters, on the underside of a leaf and destroying one of my precious cuttings.

Fairy contains quite a lot of harsh chemicals to remove burned-on food etc, so I use shower gel rather then Fairy. Whichever you use you only need about 4-5 little drops in 1/2 litre of water. It's not the detergent that does the damage to the aphids. The detergent just breaks the surface...

I imagine that heat would deter them, but they're mostly active at night when it's cooler. YouTube has clips of slugs nonchalantly slithering over razor blades and I sometimes see them on the brickwork on my house. It takes a lot to deter a determined slug!

Shore flies are abundant atm - you could have a Google and see if they may be a match.There's a sycamore I pass daily and the leaves are covered in similar looking flies all doing their very best to make more flies