It could be almost anything, Mia, but that's not what you're wanting to hear, is it? Do you have slugs or snails that might be eating your plants at night? If so, you'll likely find them when you go out after dark with a flashlight.

If the weather were cool, or it were April or early May and if the holes were small, it could be flea beetles but at our house (don't know if this is true in your part of the state), flea beetles are only an issue during cool weather.

It might be blister beetles. Some years they eat pepper foliage. There are striped ones and solid colored ones. I most often see the solid black ones, but a couple of years ago had the striped ones. Earlier this week, Robert (BusyOne) mentioned that blister beetles had shown up in large numbers at his place in eastern OK and were stripping his pepper plants so, naturally, when I saw this question, I thought of the blister beetles.

If your pepper plants were here in my garden, it would be the dastardly grasshoppers who are eating pepper foliage. The hoppers are smart enough that they usually are not in the garden actively feeding when I go out there, but the signs of their damage are abundant this year.

Some caterpillars eat pepper foliage. Normally, if it is caterpillars, they leave behind some frass. One of the caterpillars that likes to eat pepper foliage is the tomato or tobacco hornworm, and they can be very hard to spot because of their green color.

This is, for much of the state, an exceptionally hot and exceptionally dry year and native vegetation that pests often eat "first" before they eventually come to our gardens is of very poor quality in some areas and even non-existent in others. (Some counties have a relative greenness rate as low as 1% so if you're a pest in those areas, where are you going to go? To the irrigted gardens and yards of course.) Because of the heat and drought, I expect we all will have immense numbers of pests coming to our garden this year. In years when that happens, I often have pests on plants that I never see otherwise.

I'm going to go find and link the OSU fact sheet on Pepper Production in Oklahoma. It likely will list some pepper pests I haven't even thought of yet.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Pepper Production

I suspect that blister beetles are the ones that ate my strawberry plants now that I'm looking at the picture. When I watered the berry bed a few nights ago, there was a mass exodus of insects from the mulch, and there were a lot of black beetles that look very similar to this. I also saw a lot of spiders and very tiny crickets, but I'm pretty sure most spiders don't eat leaves.

Will spinosad kill blister beetles or do I need to find something else to get rid of them?

Heather,

I hate these things but rarely kill them because they eat grasshopper eggs and grasshoppers are my major garden pest here. So, I've never tried Spinosad on them. Maybe someone else has and can report it if worked on them or not.

If I see them just running around on the ground, I assume they are searching for grasshopper eggs and leave them alone. Sometimes if they are stripping a pepper plant or tomato plant, I hand-pick them and either drop them into a bowl of soapy water to drown or crush them or, if I have garden scissors nearby, I snip them in half. Avoid touching them without a gloved hand (I use disposable gloves so I can toss them in the trash afterwards) to avoid getting the blisters.

I don't know of any spiders who eat leaves either.

I've linked an old thread from a couple of years ago when blister beetles were an issue. If I had lime around, I'd be inclined to try Mick's mixture of agricultural lime and flour or DE in order to protect the plants' remaining foliage.

Y'all can catch all your blister beetles and mail them to me. I'll put them to work eating grasshopper eggs!

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Previous Blister Beetle Thread

I guess next time I water I'll take a bucket of soapy water out with me and grab the ones that flee from the flood. Maybe if I do both that and the spinosad I'll take care of the problem.

After sleuthing last night with the flashlight around 10pm, I'm no wiser. Saw several flies on one plant, an ant, what might have been an aphid (singular!) and one roly poly on the ground. No slugs or snails that I see (I'm sure it's not really moist enough for them to want to hang out - I'm trying to only water minimally to force plants to look deeper for H2O.) Saw a little more damage this morning, but still no idea of the culprit. I think I'll give it a day or two or three, and if the damage continues and I can't find the culprit, hit the peppers with Neem oil or an organic insecticidal soap spray I bought at Home Depot.

So, to bring this back up to the top, I noticed that my lantana and 4 o'clocks in the front flower beds also have these holes and chewing of the leaves, but no sign of the bugs. does that give anyone any other ideas about what it could be?