06/04/2026
😀💚👇
Something ate your plant last night. The leaf has holes. Your first instinct is to spray.
The shape of the damage tells you exactly who did it — and most of the time, the answer is "leave it alone."
Ragged irregular holes with a silver slime trail — slugs. They feed at night. Perfect circles cut from the leaf edge — not a pest at all. That's a leafcutter bee, and she's cutting pieces to line a nest. She's pollination infrastructure. The leaf grows back. She doesn't.
🌿 The one that got me: the white squiggly trails inside the leaf, the ones that look like someone drew on it with a pen — that's a leaf miner larva feeding between the two surfaces of the leaf. It looks alarming. It's cosmetic. The plant doesn't care.
Skeletonized leaves with only veins remaining — Japanese beetle. The one case where hand-picking actually matters, because they feed in groups and attract more.
Clean chunks from the edge with no slime trail — caterpillar. She's a butterfly or moth larva. She's also what the chickadee is feeding her chicks right now.
Eight damage patterns. The leaf already told you who was there and whether it matters 🐾
