Saddle River’s Serene Seclusion & High-End Aura

Garden Pests and Backyard Bullies

Like the surrounding areas, Saddle River is home to all kinds of colorful creatures. While many pests enter crawlspaces, attics, garages, and bathrooms, gardens and backyards are fair game, too.

Aphids are soft-bodied insects that congregate on plants and feed by suckling out sap, leaving behind a sticky honeydew. This doesn’t exactly keep botany booming; instead, it stunts the plant’s growth and causes mold growth. Aphids reproduce extremely quickly and commonly attack roses, fruit trees, vegetables, and ornamentals. 

Japanese beetles are pests non grata in many Saddle River gardens; they’re a notorious East Coast invader, most active in spring and summer. They completely ravage plants, leaving behind nothing but veins, and they enjoy quite the garden variety in their diet, feasting on roses, grapes, and fruit trees. 

Slugs and snails thrive in damp soil beds and, channeling their inner vampires, typically come out at night to feed. They’re most destructive to crops that grow low to the ground. When populations are high, they can wipe out entire seedlings (young plants), but that’s not the only evidence they leave behind; a trail of slime is a sign of snail or slug activity.

Squash vine borers feed on squash plants, pumpkins, and zucchini. Their larvae dig into a plant’s stem, cutting off its water supply, and causing total collapse and damage that appears seemingly overnight. They’re hard to detect, since they hide inside the plant, and are among the most irritating garden pests on the planet.