Garden Pests by Plant
52 pest × host combinations. Pick a pest to see which plants it attacks and the host-specific, organic-first control.
Why organize pests by plant?
Because that is how you actually encounter the problem. You rarely go looking for aphids; you walk out to the tomato bed and find curled, sticky new growth. Starting from the plant rather than the insect cuts out an identification step, and it surfaces the fact that the same pest behaves differently on different hosts — the signs it produces on lettuce are not the signs it produces on a pepper plant, and the control that suits a leafy crop can be unsuitable for something you are about to harvest.
The 52 combinations below are organized by pest, with every host that pest is documented on. That structure is deliberate: seeing the host list at a glance is what reveals where an infestation is coming from. A pest with several hosts in one bed has a continuous food supply and does not need to migrate in from elsewhere, which means removing it from a single plant will not solve the problem — rotation and sanitation will. Where a pest has only one host, the management question narrows considerably.
Reading a pest-by-host sheet
Each sheet gives host-specific signs — what this pest looks like on this crop, which is not always what a general pest description would lead you to expect — and a control order that runs from cultural and mechanical methods to organic sprays and, last, conventional products. The general pest pages carry the lifecycle and prevention detail, while these sheets carry the host-specific expression of the problem; using them together is faster than either alone.
Two reminders that apply throughout. Confirm the identification before treating, because a large share of ineffective treatments were aimed at the wrong organism, and check that whatever you intend to apply is labelled for that crop and permitted in your state — restrictions vary by jurisdiction and several products are limited near waterways or in home use. If you are working from symptoms rather than a sighting, the diagnoser and the plant problem pages both start from what you can see rather than from the pest, which is often the more natural entry point.