Cabbage white butterflies
The eggs of the cabbage white butterfly are yellow-green, oval, and slightly larger than a grain of sand. The moths lay them in enormous numbers mostly on the underside of leaves. On a sunny day like today I can see the butterflies hovering over cabbages, radishes and broccoli.
I go down to the garden at dusk and turn over the leaves, and the eggs are everywhere. They look as though the leaf has suddenly broken out in tiny acne. Surprisingly quickly - in just a few days - the eggs hatch out and a tiny mint green grub begins to eat.
For the first few days of its life it lives on the underside of the leaf. It is little more than a smear of life, hardly detectable. The earliest signs of its presence are tiny holes between the veins of the leaf.
Left alone, it grows fatter by the hour, and the leaf is ravaged. Before long only the veins are left, and the cabbage plant (or broccoli or Brussels sprout or cauliflower) is little more than a skeleton, the fruiting heart of the plant festooned in green gooey caterpillar poo.
In theory there are insect predators of the cabbage white and its larvae, but every gardener I know finds that the predators don’t do a good enough job. I am told that the birds are put off by the fact that the vegetables the caterpillar feeds off all contain mustard-like oils, and these give the grubs an unpleasant taste.
The cabbage white butterfly, and its cousin the cabbage moth, are two of the sternest challenges I know to organic gardening. Left alone and they will leave you with no crop.
Perhaps it is the drought, but there seem to be more predators around this year. Ladybirds are everywhere. So too are the larvae of lacewings, which predate on the eggs of the cabbage moth.
But even with the large numbers of these tiny predators, there is really only one way, short of spraying, to forestall the effects of the pests.
You have to get down on your knees, turn the leaves over and brush the eggs off, and squash the tiny caterpillars before they do too much damage. I have just been doing this for a dozen cabbage plants and half a dozen broccoli. It took me twenty minutes to do a thorough job. This has to be one of the surest demonstrations that gardeners do not grow vegetables to save money, since almost anything else you chose to do with your time would be more cost effective.
Tackling the caterpillars is not exactly unpleasant work. There is satisfaction in leaving a clean, uneaten leaf and in anticipating the crop to come. Since the eggs take at least a couple of days to hatch, it doesn’t even need to be done every day. You can leave it as long as a week so long as you are thorough, and don’t mind risking some holes in your leaves.
Still, there are moments when I am on my knees brushing leaves and squashing caterpillars when I wonder what on earth I am doing with my life. This, I tell myself, is not the path to fame and fortune. This is not the way to make a difference. This is not why I studied for and passed exams, or why I read four newspapers a day, or why I write. This is not what I had in mind at all.
But I have found that like so many things in life, tacking the caterpillars goes best when I don’t think about it at all, but simply do it. Sometimes it is surprising how easy contentment can be.
Hint: Some say that sprinkling small white things - cut up cardboard, or broken egg shells - among your plants will fool the cabbage whites into thinking the area is already over populated, and that they should lay their eggs elsewhere.
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POSTED IN: How to Grow Stuff, Vegetables
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