Hello everyone welcome back to the Epic Gardening

podcast we are joined again by Susan Mulvahill she's a master gardener out of

Spokane Washington and her book it's called The Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook,

and it's coming out April 6th. So either pre-order or order a copy, highly recommend.

And it goes right to today's topic

Susan which is how to identify bugs in your garden.

You mentioned your master gardener.

One of the services that's provided is to help gardeners out with

all sorts of things, pests and diseases and growing conditions or problems.

And I'm sure you've gotten more than your fair share of questions about, hey, just what is this bug?

And maybe there's a sort of technique that you use as a master gardener to identify bugs that we can all use at home as well.

Right. And you know, as I was thinking about this book, I kept thinking that's the big thing. We're out in the garden and we see a bug

and we don't know what it is. And so what I tried to do was put all the tools that people need to identify the bugs.

There's detailed pest profiles that include photos of the different stages of each bugs life

cycle to help them out with this and there's even a chart of the good

bug so you can recognize them and learn what they do to help us out.

So I think the most important step to resolving bug issues in your garden is to properly identify the bug that's causing a problem.

So a lot of bugs might look quite frightening and especially the beneficial insects.

You know, we're not familiar with those different life stages.

So for example, you brought this up yesterday.

We all know and love ladybugs.

And we know what that adult looks like,

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