We have a new foe in our garden:
OH HAI!!! I'm gonna kill you, m'kay??
These little jerks have been wreaking absolute havoc on my broccoli lately! I found 6 just today, in addition to several over the past few days. The are eating off the leaves of my broccoli plants little by little. If you’re having problems with something eating your broccoli, cauliflower, or cabbage, this guy might be your culprit. If you don’t find the caterpillars themselves, their poop on the leaves is always a good indication of their presence:
Caterpillar Poop
I think that these guys are “cabbage loopers”, although they don’t look exactly like the Wikipedia picture. Mine are fuzzier and softer, I think they are putting up a defense of “cuteness”…well, I’m not falling for it. As far as I’m concerned, they’re bird food.
No wonder this particular broccoli plant has been so slow to produce anything, its been fighting off these little jerks for weeks probably.
baby broccoli head
And not only are my broccoli plants under attack, I’ve been finding a lot of tomatoes that have this general appearance:
holy tomatoes
I’m pretty sure I have some sort of caterpillar eating my tomatoes too.
So what’s a gardener to do?? Well, I read up in my Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control about my issues. This book is cool because you can look up your issues by plant type, and then by what problem your plant is having. You can also look up pest types.
I didn’t set out to specifically do organic gardening. We had something eating our tomatillo leaves for a while (still actually) and we employed some Sevin spray which basically kills anything smaller than a rat. Before my husband applied this stuff, he read the warnings on the back. They basically request that you don a Hazmat suit before spraying the stuff. All exposed skin should be covered, eyes protected, etc. Plus, you can’t harvest the vegetables from those plants for anywhere from 3 days to 2 weeks. Toxic much? Yea, no thanks. I’d rather not have to worry about poisoning myself with my own home-grown vegetables.
So my organic gardener’s book gave me the solution: B_t_k. I’m writing it like that so I get fewer people on this site looking for cool info on serial killers. B_t_k stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, var. kurstaki. Its a type of bacteria! God I love biology! Basically, the B_t_k bugs live harmlessly in your garden (you can harvest on the day of spraying) and leaves crystals behind on the leaves that the caterpillars ingest and then THEY DIE. Go bacteria!!!!
Better living through microbiology, I just love it! I bought some in a slurry called Thuricide, purchased at our local garden store, diluted it in water, then sprayed it using a pressure sprayer all over our broccoli and tomato plants.
I will of course report back on the effectiveness of the B_t_k. I’m sure that once I get rid of the caterpillars there will be something else to fill the niche. The ongoing battle for supremacy of the garden!