Lupine

Wild lupine seed is every bit as hard-coated as the annual species, and sowing it untreated usually gives a thin, straggling stand. Nick or sand the seed and use a Rhizobium inoculant, or sow in fall and let winter weathering do the work. Established plants shed seed that comes up on its own, which is how a short-lived perennial keeps a patch going.

A sowing that produces far fewer seedlings than the seed count suggested, thin and patchy across the bed rather than failing outright. Seedlings appearing in dribs and drabs over weeks or months instead of together in one flush. Volunteers turning up a year or two later in a spot you sowed once and gave up on, which is the clearest sign the seed was dormant rather than dead. Seed that still looks plump, hard, and undamaged when you dig it back up, with no swelling and no sign of rot. A soak test settles it: leave a sample in warm water overnight and count how many have swollen. Seed that has taken up water goes visibly fatter and softer, while hard seed sits unchanged at the bottom of the glass.

There is nothing to treat once the seed is in the ground - dormant seed is not sick, and no drench or feed will wake it. Give it time first: keep the bed weeded and unturned and look again after the next season of rain, because a sowing that looked like a failure often fills in over the following year or two as the coats break down on their own. If you want the display sooner, sow again in the same window with properly scarified seed rather than assuming the site is at fault. Do not dig or hoe the bed deeply while you wait, since that buries viable seed too far down to emerge. Once a patch has established this stops being a problem at all: seed shed in place is weathered by sun, soil, and frost exactly as the plant intends, and volunteers come up on their own schedule year after year.

Scarify before sowing. Nick each seed through the coat with a nail file or a sharp knife, taking care not to cut into the pale interior, or shake a batch between two sheets of coarse sandpaper or in a jar lined with it. An overnight soak in warm water helps a little on its own and much more after scarifying; treat again any seed that has not swollen by morning. Buying pre-scarified seed is easier and far more even than doing it by hand, and it is usually sold pre-inoculated with the right Rhizobium bacteria as well. Sow scarified seed promptly, within a few weeks, because once the coat is breached the seed no longer stores. Sow in the season the plant actually wants, press it into firm contact with the soil at the shallow depth the packet gives, and keep the bed evenly damp until the seedlings are up, since scarified seed that dries out mid-germination is simply lost. Sow more thickly than seems necessary the first year.

Lupine seed is physically dormant: the coat is a hard, waxy, waterproof shell that does not let water in until weather, soil microbes, or an animal has worn it through. That is deliberate on the plant part - a single year of seed germinates across several seasons, so one bad spring cannot wipe out the population. In a garden it reads as failure. Untreated seed sown into a prepared bed often gives a scattered, disappointing stand in the first year while the rest of it sits in the soil waiting, and the gardener concludes the seed was dead or the site was wrong. Nothing is attacking the seed and this is not a disease; it is a mechanical barrier, and the fix is mechanical too.

They work on the soft new growth as it pushes from the crown in spring, which is the one moment a lupine cannot shrug damage off, and on self-sown seedlings. A wet spring in a mulched border is when it happens. Keep mulch and debris back from the crowns and check the emerging shoots after rain.

Irregular ragged holes chewed out of the middle of leaves and along the edges - not the clean-edged cuts a caterpillar leaves. Seedlings that vanish overnight, or that are cut off at soil level with nothing left behind. Silvery dried slime trails across leaves, soil, pots, and paving in the morning: this is the giveaway that tells you it was mollusks rather than an insect. Chewed pits in ripe fruit, especially where it rests on the ground. Damage that shows up on the lowest, dampest leaves first and gets worse after rain or evening watering. Turn over a board, an upturned pot, or a clump of dense mulch during the day and look for the animals themselves sheltering in the cool underneath.

Hand-picking works and costs nothing: go out an hour after dark with a headlamp, drop what you find into soapy water, and repeat nightly for a week or two - persistence is what wins, not any single product. Shallow beer traps sunk to soil level catch them too, but need emptying and refilling daily to be worth anything. Iron-phosphate bait is the standard control and is far lower-risk around pets and wildlife than the old metaldehyde products, but it is not harmless: many formulations include EDTA, and a dog that eats a quantity of pellets can develop iron toxicosis. Scatter it thinly per the label, never in piles, and keep dogs off a baited bed. Clear fallen foliage and debris in autumn, where the eggs are laid. In a wet climate this is a population you manage each season rather than one you eradicate - and on most established plants light grazing is cosmetic and needs nothing at all.

Take away the daytime shelter first: lift boards and upturned pots, clear piles of debris, keep dense mulch pulled back from crowns and stems, and give crowded plantings enough airflow to dry out. Water in the morning rather than the evening so the surface is dry by the time they come out. Copper tape around containers and raised beds gives them a shock they will not cross, and it is the one barrier that reliably works. Get plants past the vulnerable stage quickly - start seedlings in pots and set them out at a decent size rather than direct-sowing into a cold wet bed, since most plants stop being worth defending once the leaves toughen. Leave the ground beetles, frogs, toads, and ground-feeding birds alone, because they eat mollusks all night for free and broad-spectrum slug pellets kill them too. Where thick-leaved or resistant varieties exist for what you are growing, they take far less damage.

Slugs and snails are nocturnal mollusks that rasp ragged holes in soft leaves, shear off seedlings at ground level, and chew into ripe fruit that touches the soil. They feed at night and in the early morning and spend the day hidden under boards, pots, dense mulch, leaf litter, and low foliage, becoming active in exactly the cool, damp, shaded conditions that suit young plants. Damage is heaviest in wet spells and on tender spring growth: a single wet week can erase a row of seedlings while an established, tough-leaved plant of the same species is barely marked. They lay clusters of small pearly eggs in damp soil and under debris, so a garden with plenty of cover carries a resident population year after year rather than being invaded from outside.

The large lupine aphid is the notable species here and can mass on the flower spikes heavily enough to weaken the plant just as it is about to bloom - more of a pest on lupines than on most perennials. Check the stems as the buds rise and knock colonies off before they build.

Dense clusters of tiny insects packed onto shoot tips, flower buds, and the undersides of young leaves. Curled, cupped, or distorted new growth that never opens properly. A sticky shine on the leaves - and on whatever sits under the plant - that later goes black with sooty mold. Tiny white cast skins left behind where a colony has been feeding. Ants running steadily up and down the stems, which is often the first thing you notice. Mottled, streaked, or misshapen leaves that do not grow out can mean a virus the aphids brought with them rather than the feeding itself.

Knock the colonies off with a hard jet of water and repeat every few days - on most plants that alone ends it. Pinch out or prune off the worst-infested tips rather than treating the whole plant. If colonies keep rebuilding, spray insecticidal soap or horticultural oil directly onto the insects, covering leaf undersides, and repeat weekly until they are gone; treat early or late in the day, and never spray a wilted or heat-stressed plant. Avoid broad-spectrum insecticides - they kill the ladybugs, lacewings, and parasitic wasps that were about to solve the problem for you, and aphid numbers usually come back worse afterward. Anything you spray must be labeled for the plant you are treating; follow that label and observe its pre-harvest interval. On anything you eat, wash leaves, heads, and buds well before use, since aphids hide down in crowns, folds, and tight growth.

Go easy on nitrogen: the soft, lush growth that heavy feeding produces is exactly what aphids breed on. Check new growth once a week through spring and early summer so you catch colonies while they are still small, and rub the first few out with your fingers. Leave flowering plants nearby and skip broad-spectrum sprays - ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps do most of this work for free, and they only stay if there is something for them to eat. Keep ants off the plant where you can, since they protect aphids from those predators. Water steadily so plants are not stressed, and check any new plant over before you bring it home or move it indoors, since aphids usually arrive on something else.

Aphids are small soft-bodied sap-suckers - green, black, gray, pink, or waxy white, and mostly wingless - that gather in dense colonies on the tenderest new growth: shoot tips, buds, and the undersides of young leaves. They breed extremely fast in mild weather, so a few can become hundreds inside a week. Their feeding curls and distorts soft growth, and the sticky honeydew they excrete coats everything below and turns black with sooty mold. Ants often farm and defend the colonies for that honeydew. A few aphids are normal on almost any plant and a healthy plant shrugs them off; only dense, persistent colonies do real damage, and some aphids also spread plant viruses as they feed.