In general, earwigs can be beneficial to your garden, but they can get out of control, so you should use the general spray we’ll give you later in the book. There are a number of ways to control earwigs, but trapping them is probably the best way to eliminate them from your garden.
One way we like is to take a shallow dish and place beer in it. Any beer will do. The earwigs will be attracted to the beer, climb in, drink, and die. You can sift out the dead ones and reuse the beer for trapping again. They are also attracted to corn oil, fish oil, or water and vinegar. You can place these in dishes just like the beer.
If the leaves of your plants are finely speckled with yellow spots or a silvery, metallic sheen, you could have thrips. Thrips are very small – about 1/16” - and difficult to see. There are many varieties of thrips and they are of all different colors.
Thrips are best controlled with sprays as we’ve described. You can also spray the plants with soapy water. Lady bugs will eat thrips as well, so attract those lady bugs to your garden!