Knowledgebase
Help, what is eating my plants #842130
Asked July 23, 2023, 11:52 AM EDT
Baltimore County Maryland
Expert Response
Instead, you can hand pick (remove) any pest found; some beetles are quite easy to dispatch by knocking them off into a pan of soapy water to drown (the types of beetles that don't jump tend to just drop/fall off the plant instead of flying away as soon as they're disturbed, which makes collecting them fairly easy). Most leaf-feeding insects like those causing this kind of damage are not active all summer so will eventually disappear and the plants should outgrow (or at least tolerate) the damage.
Holes in rose foliage in particular could be from Japanese Beetle adults this time of year, but mainly are due to the feeding from one or more generations of Roseslug Sawfly larvae, a very common rose pest. (Despite "slug" in the name, these are insects that look a little like small caterpillars and tend to hide on the undersides of the foliage.) Although the sawfly feeding can create lots of holes, rose shrubs tend to tolerate it well and don't suffer much for the amount of temporary damage the sawflies can inflict. Here too, hand-picking is the most straightforward approach but a few lower-toxicity pesticide options exist if they persist, as mentioned on that linked page for sawflies.
On hostas, we tend to see damage from slugs/snails most often.
Miri
Miri