Garden Pests

I've been having a heck of a time this year with garden pests!  I'm new to all this gardening stuff, so I wasn't really aware of all the pests that could plague my poor garden.  Luckily nothing has been totally decimated, and hopefully it will stay that way!

The first pest I had to deal with was cucumber beetles.  They started attacking the squash almost immediately after planting.  I squished the bugs the first day, and then applied a cover of cheesecloth the second day.  Luckily the beetles went away once there wasn't any food left, and I was able to remove the cheesecloth before the squash flowered.

Cucumber beetle next to a squash plant.

I had read about using cucumber slices in water as a trap for the beetles, but it didn't work.

The cucumber trap.

Covered squash.

Squash under the cheesecloth.

The next pest was a bit bigger...a groundhog!  I went out into the garden one day and found a broccoli plant, both of my parsley plants, and several of my flowers eaten almost to the ground.  We knew there had been groundhogs there last year, but I was hoping they were gone.  Guess not!  We set out a live trap, and caught one the next day.  This was about 2 weeks ago, and since then I haven't seen any evidence of the little bugger.  Until a few days ago...  Once again the same broccoli plant was munched, and a few more flowers.  My husband went out today and found a second hole!  He moved the live trap to that one, so we'll check it in the morning.

The broccoli after it recovered.

Abby checking out the live trap.

And now we're back to dealing with the cucumber beetles!  This time on the cucumbers.  I covered most of the plants with cheesecloth again, and will do the rest tomorrow.  These little things are getting annoying!

Poor munched cucumber.

Protected!

Something is eating my pepper plants too...I think it is snails.  I put out some snail bait, we'll see if that works.