The Cottage Smallholder

I thought this year I had been clever by making a cage around my cabbages and covering them with bird and butterfly proof netting- and up until a few days ago this was successful, I have watched many a frustrated butterfly try and get access without success! -just some minor early damage and the hearts were firming up nicely.

Today when I went over to dig up some extra soil from a heap of sieved soil nearby,  I realised they were absolutely covered in mainly small, but some quite large, caterpillers - couldn''t figure out how until I saw that the turnips planted alongside the cage were also smothered in caterpillers and very little green leaf left.- my reckoning is that they just crawled through the net on to the cabbages when they were tiny enough to get through the mesh.

Much as I dislike using chemical pest control, I did spray them all with bug killer- they are under a net so other animals should be safe from the effects.  Within ten minutes, there were no wrigglies on the cabbages. Now we have to wait some days before we can harvest any cabbages, just when they were beginning to get to a harvesting stage. BAH humbug!