Is Something Eating Your Dahlias? Let's figure out what it is!
It’s that time of year. You’ve been watching with great anticipation as your dahlia bud begins to show color. It opens so slowly— or so it feels because it’s the first one and you’ve been waiting months to see a dahlia again (or maybe for the first time! Eeek!!) Then one morning you walk out and you see a hole in your leaf or the corner has been chewed!
How Dare They?? How dare some little creature enjoy breakfast from your dahlia petal!
Image by Valerie Miros- Grasshopper Damage
Don’t worry— there’s hope! The bugs are not going to decimate your entire garden (despite how it may feel!).
So what do we do? First, don’t panic! Seriously, in the grand scheme of things, a nibbled petal is not really a big deal. You may roll your eyes and say I know— But you wouldn’t believe how upset I see some people get over a chewed petal.
Second, you gotta’ figure out what’s eating it? Inspect your plant, turn over the leaves, look carefully between all the layers and see if you can find the culprit. Also notice what might be flying around the plant . Often times, the culprits will fly up when you ruffle the leaves.
Take pictures of the damage. I find that if I need to Google to figure out the culprit that a picture is better than my memory.
No sign of anything? Then there are a few culprits who you don’t see but they love a tasty petal or leaf. Slugs are a big one, especially on new growth or the sprouts just as the dahlias are peaking out of the ground.
Grasshoppers— if you see petal damage where it looks like something just took a dull knife to several petals at once and chopped them off- probably grasshoppers.
Are your dahlias turning brown especially where the petals meet the center? Most likely thrips. Thrips are very small brown bugs which are hard to see but cause loads of damage- they really like white/pastel colored dahlias. If you think you might have thrips, but aren’t sure- shake your flower over a white piece of paper. The thrips will fall out and be brown specks.
Cucumber beetles are another common pest. A lot of people grow vegetable gardens near their dahlias. Cucumber beetles love dahlias and anything in the squash family. The squash family (cucurbits) attract the beetle and then it finds its way over to your dahlias and has dessert from your pretty cafe au lait petals! Cucumber beetles can be very devasting to a dahlia field. So much so that I’ve stopped growing anything in the cucurbit family within 100 yds of my dahlia field. This practice has significantly reduced the number of cucumber beetles that I see each year.
These are a lot of the common pests that do visible damage to dahlias. However there are some that don’t appear to be hurting anything because they don’t chew but can be very detrimental to your plants.
Leafhoppers are one. They are small green bugs that hop from plant to plant. They do suck sap out of your plant. Leaf hoppers are a vector insect- which means that if a dahlia has a disease/virus etc. they can carry it to another plant. So while you may not see much visible damage from leafhoppers, they can be very detrimental, especially if you are growing a high number of plants.
We’ve identified a lot of the common pests that plague our dahlias- so what do we do about them?
The answer to that is coming up in our next article because this is too much for one post!
If you are having issues with a pest that we didn’t name here, see if you can get a picture of the pest or the damage and send it our way! You can submit it here.