You will have to learn to identify garden insect pests in order to ensure the safety of your precious plants. This article will tell you about the characteristics of major insect pests found in gardens and about the plants they are most likely to favour.

If you have invested a lot of effort and money into making your garden picture perfect, you will also have to protect it from common pests that could destroy it. The first step to protecting your precious garden is learning to identify garden insect pests. This will help you understand what sort of pests to look out for and the kind of damage they might cause to the plants you have. You will also be able to eliminate these pests in the early larval stages. Here are a few tips you might find helpful in identifying common garden pests.

1.  Cutworms are the easiest when you set about to identify garden insect pests. The immature stage of moths, cutworms have a voracious appetite for emergent plants in spring. It is usually dull gray or gray brown in color and is about six centimeters in length. After it has finished feeding, the army cutworm changes into the adult moth commonly referred to as the Miller Moth. They inflict the most damage in the period from Late April to early May.

2.  The seed corn maggot is important when you identify garden insect pests. This insect attacks the seeds of many warm-season vegetables like bean, corn and sometimes melon and cucumber. The seed corn maggot is one-fourth inch long, and yellow-white in color. Maggots burrow into the seed, causing failure to sprout or producing a bad plant. This insect transmits a bacteria that causes soft rot. 

3.  You will have to clearly distinguish between the Mexican bean beetle and the ladybug when you identify garden insect pests. These two insects look alike but the ladybug is beneficial to your plant unlike the Mexican bean beetle. This beetle has 16 black spots and no white marking between the head and body. The insect lays round, yellow eggs which hatch and give forth pale yellow larvae. Eggs, larvae and adults remain on the undersides of leaves and feed there.

4.  One of the easiest to identify garden insect pests are flea beetles. They are one of the smallest varieties of beetles and jump like fleas when disturbed. Flea beetles chew small pits into leaves. They commonly attack cabbage family plants, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, horseradish, and beans.

5.  The imported cabbageworm, is an easily identifiable garden insect pest. In the initial stage the fuzzy green caterpillar rests on cabbage leaves. It transforms into the white cabbage butterfly, and may be the most frequent visitor to members of the this vegetable family.

6.  If your spinach leaves have tan blotches, it may indicate damage caused by spinach leaf miner. The immature maggot in this case burrows into leaves of spinach, beets and chard, causing blotchy dead patches. 

7.  The parsleyworm is one of the most colorful insects one can find. This is not a difficult to identify garden insect pest. The caterpillars are brightly colored and have an affinity for parsley, dill and carrot. When disturbed, they project a pair of fleshy antennae which look like horns. These caterpillars transform into the black swallowtail butterfly, a large, attractive insect that will visit flowers and suck nectar.