Pests, Diseases and Cures

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

They often look poor here because of the climate - too wet for them. If you can keep them well spaced out, that helps with the airflow, and that's the most important thing for improving the conditions, but you'll possibly still get the problem and there's not much you can do other than removing...

It is more noticeable where I am this year because we have had such a wet winter and I think the extra water has fuelled lush growth.

Another one here for hail damage for most of it. Healthy plants will grow out of it.

Yes they were hardened off before planting in the ground. The others are all okay. I wasn’t sure if I’d overwatered them. Hopefully they’ll still be okay then. Thank you @flounder for replying

The edema nodules are part of the plant, so no need to remove them. Basically, you don't need to do anything.

Thank you for the reply, I am still not sure. My tomatoes are sitting in the greenhouse since the beginning of April, I doubt its sun scald, but it could be the reaction to cold, maybe. I am not sure. I wonder if potato-leaved tomatoes are more prone to cold-damage than regular tomatoes....

Stems look way too thin for phyllostachys, so I'll stick with my fargesia idea but what do I know...

Yes - I wouldn't be worried at all. They're tough. They're more likely to get slug damaged than anything else, which is why I rarely grow them now.

I personally go out every evening, look for the slugs and snails, collect them in a bucket and feed them to my chickens next morning. I don't manage to get every single slug and snail, there's the odd one or two that escape me, but I definitely have the numbers reduced. And at least Penny and...

Funny KT53 they never bother my Hostas but instead decimate my climing rose (typically only after I treat the black spot, I swear that rose hates me). Can’t grow strawberries they never last the season and nematodes are so expensive here I tend to just work around with plants they ignore.