Caterpillars

Rovver125

First year in our new home & our garden has been plagued by caterpillars.

There seems to be two different types. There is one that has a brown colouring with a light yellow stripe & some of these I have found are huge! Found loads that are a bright green colour also. Pretty sure cabbage whites were responsible for a lot of damage also, saw the butterflies & found the eggs all over spinach & salad leaves.

I've found them on everything though, herbs, perennials, potato tops, carrot tops, strawberries, even in the sun room on tomato & pepper plants. I spent a fair bit of money on plants this summer to kick start the garden & several are almost bare stems now.

Was trying to hand pick rather than use chemicals, but I'm fighting a losing battle! Last night I popped out for ten minutes after dark with a torch & found 17 on various plants.

Between them & the slugs/snails they have desecrated all my efforts this year & looking round the garden last night I felt so disheartened!

How does everyone deal with them?

A._Badger

Rovver125 wrote: »

First year in our new home & our garden has been plagued by caterpillars.

There seems to be two different types. There is one that has a brown colouring with a light yellow stripe & some of these I have found are huge! Found loads that are a bright green colour also. Pretty sure cabbage whites were responsible for a lot of damage also, saw the butterflies & found the eggs all over spinach & salad leaves.

I've found them on everything though, herbs, perennials, potato tops, carrot tops, strawberries, even in the sun room on tomato & pepper plants. I spent a fair bit of money on plants this summer to kick start the garden & several are almost bare stems now.

Was trying to hand pick rather than use chemicals, but I'm fighting a losing battle! Last night I popped out for ten minutes after dark with a torch & found 17 on various plants.

Between them & the slugs/snails they have desecrated all my efforts this year & looking round the garden last night I felt so disheartened!

How does everyone deal with them?

I protect food crops with fine mesh fabric and (not being a chemophobe) spray anywhere else when necessary. As far as I can see, your only alternatoive is to hand pick them.

Rovver125

Thanks for the response, I have a huge roll of scaffold debris netting bought cheap off ebay which is perfect for protecting the food crops next year, so that should help.

I've accepted the fact I'll probably have to resort to chemical warfare to protect the other plants. We have a large pond in the garden & have seen numerous frogs & toads, also have numerous visiting birds, but they don't seem to make much of a dent of the caterpillars.

What chemicals do you use? Are they quite selective in what they kill or likely to cause harm to other things? We have four rabbits in two separate hutches/runs close to where we grow a lot & obviously don't want to nuke them if possible, or the bees, butterflies, although beautiful, I'm not so sure about anymore....

Elsewhere

It has been an unusually good year for butterflies this year - I expect you won't suffer so badly from caterpillars again for a while.

Some caterpillars are poisonous to eat, maybe that's why your amphibians didn't gobble them up.

Rovver125

It's difficult to find a balance isn't it, I like butterflies & would hate to never see them, but at the same time, it would break my heart to see the garden demolished again like this next year. After a google search I think one the types I'm seeing may actually be a moth caterpillar.

Planted nine monardas in the first border I created & three of them are reduced to bare stalks whilst the other six are well on their way to nothing! Does anyone know if these are likely to regrow next year? Went out last night after I posted this & found another nine just in a 5 min sweep.

The bunnies are fuming as well, planted a load of herbs near their runs, including one of their favourites, mint & the caterpillars keep eating it before the bunnies get a look in! I know slugs & snails are doing a lot of damage too. Have to break out the big guns next year I suppose!

A._Badger

Personally, I try to use pyrethrum based sprays when I can, though like all pesticides the choice is now very limited and the price has been manipulated accordingly, so they may be hard to find or too expensive to use. Doff's 'All In One Big Spray' seems to work quite well.

The secret here is to read the active ingredients list with care and do your sums on the respective costs. All you are interested in is the active ingredient and its strength: the rest is filler and packaging so you might as well buy the cheapest version you can get, providing it offers the same product at the same strength.

Keep it away from your rabbits and they should be fine as it is relatively safe to use.

I suspect your monardas will be OK, too. Mine have suffered badly from what I take to be powdery mildew in years gone by but have always bounced back the following year..

Good luck!

Rovver125

Thought I'd share these pics, another brief 5 min stint in the garden this evening & found these, on a chrysanthemum, mint, chives & strawberries.






These seem to be the main types I'm finding, the big one in the second picture is almost 2" long & a really fat body!

Getting on google now to try & identify them. Guessing they are common types?

Edited to add: google search a bit inconclusive really, so many that look very similar! All I know is I have found all of these on plants that have been suffering extensive damage since we moved in. Anyone seen any of these in their gardens?

Elsewhere

Maybe this website can help:-

http://www.wildlifeinsight.com/Insight/?page_id=6589

Rovver125

That's the website I was looking at last night Elsewhere!

Spent some more time on there & I'm now pretty sure the big one in the second pic is a large yellow underwing moth, the pictures of the moths look much like a moth that I noticed one evening in the summer on one of the first plants to be completely destroyed!

Wikipedia says - 'The larva is green or brown with two rows of black dashes along the back. This is one of the notorious "cutworms", causing fatal damage at the base of virtually any herbaceous plants, sometimes severing it completely. This ubiquitous species is one of the most hated of garden pests. The species overwinters as a larva and feeds on mild days throughout the winter.' Given the damage several plants have suffered, all ravaged from the inside out, this sounds a likely culprit!

The one to the left of that in the second picture I believe may be an angle shades moth, but the lime green ones I'm still unsure about.

Identifying them with 100% certainty is proving a lot harder than I'd imagined it would be! All I do know is this evening I only found half the amount, although they are all suffering the same fate. Hate killing any living thing, but it's got to be survival of the fittest when all my efforts are turning into food for these hungry beasties

I know we had a bad summer for cabbage whites as well, saw the butterflies, found the eggs on underside of leaves & found the caterpillars on peppers, tomatoes, spinach & salad crops.

At least I'm starting to get an idea of what I could be up against next year. Still really unsure about breaking out the chemical warfare though, had really hoped to avoid that....

Elsewhere

LOL - my husband is a very keen butterfly watcher so in theory I can't condone chemicals - but I am the family gardener so I sympathise with you.

The coming cold weather should bump off caterpillars that are still outside on plants however, so hopefully you won't have to keep patrolling.

According to Butterfly conservation:

"The whites did well, with both Large White and Small White numbers up by more than 300%."

http://butterfly-conservation.org/48-4480/hot-summer-helps-butterflies-bounce-back.html

So it's been rather a no-win situation for the organic brassica grower this year!

Hubby is a member of Butterfly Conservation (but not a caterpillar expert!), I'll give him your pic to forward to his friends to see if they can confirm your identification.

Rovver125

Thanks Elsewhere, I am very interested to know what they are. As I said I hate killing any living thing if it can be avoided, but what do you do in this scenario?

That's what puts me off using any sort of pesticide, I don't want to just obliterate everything! Like I said, incredibly difficult to find a balance.

Hopefully the colder weather will do the work for me as you say. We're in Cornwall so not as cold as other places, although the coldest temp my weather station has recorded so far was 2.7 C at 7am on the 13/11, which frosted over the car windscreen but obviously not cold enough to freeze the caterpillars!