Deer are my biggest challenge year round.

This year, I have tons of gypsy moth caterpillars. They are earlier than last year. They completely defoliated the oak trees last year. And annoyed my little dog, Winston the pug, to no end. he gets very upset when caterpillars drop from the sky! It is really creepy....literally.

We have many more bunnies in the neighborhood than we did last year. I suspect that is because we have less feral cats.

Ants & mosquitoes as always. Standing still is not recommended!

Quack grass and Bindweed here!

Deer, rabbits, nut grass.

Chickweed! (apparently someone let a few too many plants go to seed last year... )

Squirrels aka TREE RATS They are terrible this year...the worst ever. Don't mind if they share the birdseed, but LEAVE MY STUFF ALONE!!!!. They have chewed the screen of the screen room, destroyed the walking iris, eaten the dianthus in the little pots attached to the patio fence, and dug in and pretty much wiped out several hanging baskets and they eat the birdfeeders....rotten VARMITS I do enjoy watching their antics, but LEAVE MY STUFF ALONE

Mosquitoes and eastern lubber grasshoppers. One Lubber can devour an Amaryllis or Crinum (leaf and bulb) or eat a daylily down to the ground in one night.

Up to 4 inches long and a voracious appetite

Nasty!

Noticed the darling little rabbits ate one entire field of hostas during the last 8 hours. Tomorrow we'll gather big rocks to block their entrance and exit holes under the decking steps to the French doors.

I doubt if there's one entire leaf left in this section:


They "only" ate a few plants here so now it's covered with deer mesh and I sprinkled a lot of blood meal over the area:

That big hosta looks good enough to eat to me too. What kind of dressings do you keep on hand?

I could dig them all up and give them to my local nursery but I know we'd miss the scent on the warm August evenings. They are heavenly.

I agree Arlene, you do hostas very well.

Thanks. It's just so discouraging to protect areas from the deer and hostas from the rabbits. This is the first year they've been attacking them.

mosquitoes weeds my husband

just kiddin'

No yer not...

My worst pest this year is the pet deer that was abandoned in my small town. He wanders the town grazing and generally creating havoc. He walked in my back door looking for pets. No one in town has fences either so everyone is scrambling to protect the gardens. DNR where are you?

Welcome to Garden.org, @mnmat !

Gosh, where IS the DNR? I could see that deer -- through no fault of its own -- becoming more and more of a problem as it gets older.

Does anyone know who exactly abandonned the pet deer? There are laws against it and he or she can be fined big time. https://asci.uvm.edu/equine/la...

This year the deer fly are the worst pest in my garden...they don't bother the plants one bit but they annoy the heck out of me.

Lily beetles are eating their full this year and Black Vine Weevil Larvae ate the roots of my favorite Heuchera.

Last fall a doe found a way into the house pad garden through a break in the deer fence at the top of the slope and deer pruned most of the roses in the house pad garden. Once I got that repaired, she found a way to jump the fence at the top of vinca slope at the front of the house to get to finish pruning the house pad garden, but first she chomped the street bed rose.

When I made that fence taller, she ate her way up the vinca slope, which is almost vertical ... and made a hole under the fence and chomped the rest of the deer candy she found up there and finished off all of the other deer resistant plants out in front of the house before she moved on.

There was not much left for the deer this year and all of the possible enetry points were blocked. So, I got to start over. The plants got a harder prune than I have ever given them, and really looked good, so she may not have known how to prune according to the "rules", but she did a fine job of pruning.