What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the epic gardening podcast.

Today we again are hitting another pest and today we're dealing with one of my personal

most hated pests in the garden leaf miners. I just don't like them. They don't really destroy a

crop per se, but they do leave really annoying tunnels and trails on your

crops that not only look bad but discourage people from either buying

your produce if you're selling it at a farmer's market or to restaurants, or they just don't

look appealing for yourself to eat if you're growing your own food or maybe if you have a house plant you don't want to look at a house plant that's designed to be ornamental that has leaf miner damage.

So what are leaf miners? Well, leaf miners are actually the

larval stage of an insect family that feeds on both the top and the bottom of

leaves.

So usually if you have a pretty bad infestation,

you're going to have upwards of five maggots per leaf

and they just sort of crawl around and munch on all of that leaf tissue leaving these very weird light trails along the plant.

So the adults are about one-tenth of an inch long. They're black or grayish black

flies and they have yellow stripes on them. So they kind of look like house flies

but they're just smaller and what they'll do is they'll lay their eggs on the of inch long so they're definitely not small you should be able to see them and they are

pale yellowish greenish in color what they'll do is they'll create those winding

tunnels and then they sort of leave poop behind it's called frass but I don't know I'd rather just call it little

larva poop just because I hate it so much. So there are some interesting life cycle

issues with this plant so the larva will overwinter in the soil underneath

the plant. So it can be hard to detect if you're dealing with an overwintering leaf minor larva because again it's under the soil.

So when those temperatures warm up in the spring, they will appear as adults and then they will

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