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Vegetable Gardening

Stinking Catepillars/Worms!

greengardener07

16 years ago

This weekend, I found about a dozen Swallowtial Catepillars eating my carrots. I also found those little green worms on my brocolli. I was going to harvest a sprout off a stalk and the sprout had holes in it! It did not have holes the night before. Then, I found six of those little green buggers (not boogers) devouring my ripe brocolli heads! I had to scrap the entire brocolli crop to save my toms and cukes.

How do they get there and how do you control/get rid of them?

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Comments (2)

smonky
16 years ago
The ones on the broccoli are cabbage loopers, you just have to pick htem off as you find them or they will eat your broccoli and broccoli leaves.
We pick them off and drop t hem into a cup of alcohol.
Violet_Z6
16 years ago
Well, most gardeners want to have host plants for the swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. Next year plant some bronze fennel near your garden and they'll go to that instead.

As for your broccoli, you've just discovered why many gardeners quit growing broccoli altogether. What has finally worked for me is having a mature perennial garden that attracts beneficial insects which eat the "bad guys". This is the first year I had no problem with the loopers so I'll probably try for a fall planting of broccoli now.

Pest management is complex, if you wish to use chemical products, do so responsibly which goes further than reading the label. If you want to learn, a good place to start is here:

Integrated Pest Management
This lecture is presented in two parts. Each part is 90-minutes in length. Recorded in Sacramento County in California's Sacramento Valley, this lecture is by Mary Louise Flint, Ph.D., Director, IPM Education and Publications, UC Statewide IPM Project and Extension Entomologist & Cooperative Extension Specialist.

Education:
B.S. Plant Science, University of California, Davis
Ph.D. Entomology, University of California, Berkeley

Appointment:
100% Cooperative Extension

Research Interests:
Integrated pest management of landscape, agricultural and garden pests; biological control of arthropod pests; alternatives to pesticides; adoption of alternative practices by practitioners; innovative delivery of pest management information.

Topics discussed in the Integrated Pest Management Lecture:

* IPM references and resources
* Preventing pest problems
* Natural common enemies
* Making less toxic pesticide choices
* Controlling aphids, scales, caterpillars, coddling moths, tree borers, snails and slugs, and lawn insects.

You can watch the programs now online:

Just make sure you have Real Player installed or download it free.

Integrated Pest Management Part 1 90 minutes

Integrated Pest Management Part 2 90 minutes

You'll want to bookmark the following link to Professor Flint's Lab Research on:
Controlling Pests in Gardens and Landscapes: Vegetables and Melons

I promise you'll learn one or two things to put in your gardening bag of pest management arsenals.

;)

Here is a link that might be useful: Cabbage Looper Management
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Hummingbird moths are also sphinx moths, but the ones generally called that are the dayflying sphinx moths that nectar on flowers (or rotting fruit if available), like the Snowberry Clearwing that resembles a large bumblebee, and the Nessus sphinx that is a beautiful reddish brown with two cream colored stripes across the lower abdomen. Few of the sphinx fly during the day, and most are nocturnal, as is the Tomato and Tobacco Hornworm moths. You can generally spot them at dusk, just as light is beginning to wane, or in the early morning just before sunrise. The adult moths have 5 yellow spots on either side of their abdomen in the case of the Tomato Hornworm, and 6 spots of yellow in the case of the Tobacco Hornworm moth. Their wings move just as a Hummingbirds, too, and they hover at flowers like them also. They are fascinating to watch because no other moth family does this. Moths outnumber butterflies by 10 to 1. The tomato and tobacco hornworms use Solanaceous plants for larval food, e.g., tomato, tobacco, pepper, potatoe, Datura, Brugmansia and many more. However, tomato is generally the favored food. The Tobacco and Tomato Hornworms are large sphinx moths as indicated by the size of the caterpillars. The Hummingbird moths, like the Snowberry and the Nessus, are much smaller. I find larvae of the Snowberry Clearwing on my large honeysuckle vine, and the Nessus on my Virginia Creeper, which hosts a wide variety of various species of sphinx caterpillars. They are very cool to raise. Hope this may inspire some of you to observe them in the garden. They aren't all bad. Susan Here is a link that might be useful: Tobacco and Tomato Hornworms and Adult Moths
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