Earwigs
Risk near you, next 48h
See whether your local forecast favours this disease right now.
When it strikes
Watch it before you act
At this level the damage rarely costs the crop. Note the date, check twice a week, and act only if it reaches new growth or the weather turns favourable for it.
Carried by insects
An insect moves it plant to plant, so controlling the carrier matters as much as treating the symptom. Check for the vector before assuming the plants infected each other directly.
Safe to compost
No pathogen carries over on this material, so it can go on an ordinary heap with the rest of the garden waste.
When and where to look
Scout the planting while temperatures hold between 10°C and 30°C, with humidity above 70%.
Rule these out first
Same category, and at least one host crop in common — so they are genuinely confusable in the same part of the garden.
The signs that lead here
Full problem lists for these crops
About
Earwigs are mostly beneficial: in fruit trees they are among the best predators of aphids, psylla and codling moth eggs. They only become a pest on soft flowers — dahlias, chrysanthemums, clematis — where night feeding shreds the petals.
Symptoms
Ragged holes chewed in petals and young leaves, appearing overnight with no insect visible by day. Blooms open already tattered. Earwigs are found by day clustered in tight, dark crevices near the damage.
Organic Treatment
Trap rather than kill: an upturned pot stuffed with straw on a cane above the plant collects them overnight, and you can then tip them out at the base of a fruit tree where they do good. Repeat nightly during the flowering period.
Chemical Treatment
Spraying is rarely justified and costs you a useful orchard predator. If a show-quality bloom must be protected, a barrier of horticultural glue on the stem is more targeted than any insecticide.
Prevention
Clear dense debris and loose material around prized flower beds, and give the earwigs somewhere better to be by hanging straw-filled traps in fruit trees, where their appetite is an asset.
Crops at risk
Related problems
Earwigs risk by location
Each location has a month-by-month profile computed from the weather archive: how many hours a year actually meet this disease’s thresholds.