With all the brassicas in our garden, I was expecting cabbage worms and had been keeping an eye out for them. Last year (in Phoenix) when I grew broccoli for the first time I remembered making a frantic phone call to my mom. We had gone out to admire our lush broccoli and found green worms all over with major hole damage on the leaves. My mom, being a veteran gardener, identified the pest for us over the phone in about a second.

So this year every day when I went out to the garden I would check the underside of the cabbage leaves for baby worms. The spotted cucumber beetle damage on the leaves sounded a false alarm on more than one occasion. On Friday we noticed green baby worms for the first time. Sigh.

So out comes the Bacillus thuringiensis (B.t.). I sprayed down all my cole crops with it, making sure to get the undersides of the leaves. After a week if I still find them then I will treat the plants again. Thankfully B.t. is very effective at stopping the worms and a very natural way to go.

I don’t like having to use so many insect controls, even organic ones, but we are just getting started in this new garden. By next year we will have improved the soil fertility, and we may also experiment with row covers (to block pests) and improved irrigation (to minimize plant stress).

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.