Have you ever served broccoli at the dinner table only to find green worms cooked in your food? Yuk! A client of ours says she’ll never grow broccoli again. Too many worms. And she refuses to dump poison on her food to kill the worms. We’re showing her how to grow organic food that does not have caterpillars.

 The cabbage worm eats holes in the leaves of your cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and other brassicas. It only devours the foliage of vegetable crops and weeds in the cabbage family (Brassicaceae). It does not move by looping like an inchworm. It crawls about like most other kinds of caterpillars.

A white butterfly, the adult cabbage worm feeds on nectar of a wide variety of flowers. Like all butterflies, she has straw-like mouthparts. She can’t eat leaves, only her babies can do that. She’ll lay her eggs, usually one at a time, on the underside of brassica leaves.

The cabbage looper, another caterpillar that trashes your brassicas, moves like an inchworm. It loops its head-end forward first, then brings the rear-end forward arching its body into an upside-down U. It has an appetite for many different kinds of vegetables, not just cabbage family members.

A grayish-brown moth with a white monogram on its forewings, the cabbage looper adult flies about and lays her eggs at night so you usually won’t see her. The moth, like the butterfly, has straw-like mouth parts.

Brassicas under row covers exclude the adult butterflies and moths. Keep the adults out and you’ll avoid the damage that their caterpillars do to your crops. Cover the plants with a lightweight, white fabric that lets in air, light, and water but keeps bugs out.

Cocoons of a tiny parasitic wasp hang like little white footballs off a tomato hornworm. The female wasp laid her eggs inside the caterpillar, the eggs hatched, and the baby wasps (maggot-like) ate the caterpillar alive from the inside out. When the wasp larvae matured they ate their way through the caterpillar’s skin and spun all these little cocoons. Pretty soon the baby wasps will all fly away and hunt down more caterpillars. A gruesome tale, we know, but the point is that nature has lots of little helpers to aid you in your endeavors to grow clean, healthy vegetables without spraying poison on your food.

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David Deardorff

It’s time to get started on the vegetable garden for the coming season so you can grow your own healthy, organic food again this year. Many of us have already started seedlings indoors to transplant out to the garden or the cold frames as soon as weather permits. Kathryn and I have come up with a checklist of ten things to consider before you plant. Each item on the list helps to prevent pests and diseases in your vegetable garden. All ten of them acting in concert really gives you a leg up for a successful and productive year.

1. Sanitize. If you didn’t get around to cleaning up old left-over garden debris last autumn, do it now. Pay special attention to any dead plant material from diseased or infested plants and get it out of your garden. Fungal spores, insect eggs, and bacteria lurking on old infected dead leaves lying on the ground can quickly infect your new plants and ruin your produce all summer long.

2. Right plant, right place. Be sure and read the instructions on the seed pack or the vegetable start plant label and put your plants in the best location to meet those requirements. If your plants have the right amount of light and water, the correct temperature, and the proper soil they won’t be under stress. And stress, as we all know, predisposes our plants (as well as ourselves) to attack by pests and diseases.

3. Light and air flow. Most vegetable and fruit plants want full sun and free air movement. Plants that do not get enough sunlight will be weak and spindly, and won’t be able to produce very much food for you. Free air movement helps foliage dry quickly and helps to avoid diseases and pests so don’t crowd your plants, give them space.

4. Genetic resistance. If you have a choice, choose cultivars that are genetically resistant to diseases and pests. Less disease and fewer pests means less work for you and more produce. Sounds like a win-win to me! Most all of these disease resistant cultivars have been developed through traditional plant breeding techniques.

5. Manage water. Set up your garden so that your watering practices deliver water to the root system, not to the leaves. Keeping the leaves dry goes a long way to avoiding diseases. In general, keep your plants evenly moist for best results. Allowing your plants to get extremely dry and then flooding them to get them extremely wet results in uneven growth, deformed foliage, and reduced yields. Also try to group plants according to their watering needs.

6. Proper temperature. Some vegetables like tomatoes and sweet corn, and fruits like melons are warm season crops. These are plants that flourish in hot humid weather. Other plants like cabbage, lettuce, and spinach are cool season plants that flourish in cool temperatures. If you put warm season plants in the ground in early spring while soil and air temperatures are still quite cool, they will not grow well and may be stunted. Conversely, cool season plants planted in mid-summer may simply flower and set seed while still very tiny.

7. Build soil. Creating healthy, biologically active soil is the best way to build healthy plants. Incorporating dead plant material (not diseased!) into the soil feeds micro-organisms that break it down into simple nutrients that will ultimately feed your plants. Feeding the soil results in a complex ecosystem filled with fungi, bacteria, insects, worms, and other critters that help to out-compete the ones that want to damage your plants. Compost and organic fertilizers incorporated into the soil are excellent sources of dead plant material with which to feed your soil. Mulch placed on top of the soil around your plants will also eventually break down and feed the soil.

8. Polycultures. A polyculture is where you put lots of different plants into the same location. Corn, beans, and squash, for example, is a traditional polyculture developed by the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest centuries ago. The corn, beans, and squash are all planted together in the same bed. You can mix vegetables and fruits into your flower beds and vice versa. The important benefit you get is that it makes your plants harder for pestiferous insects to find. It also makes it difficult for fungal and bacterial disease to jump from plant to plant.

9. Rotation. Don’t put a plant in the same location where you grew it last year. Move your plants around from year to year to make them moving targets. It helps to avoid the build-up of soil-borne pests and diseases. There are lots of crop rotation systems and schemes, you can choose one of these or just create your own system, one that works for you. Many people find that a three-year rotation system works well.

This hornworm caterpillar was eaten alive by a parasite.

10. Beneficial organisms. There are lots and lots of insects and other critters that are willing and able to eat the insect pests that want to eat your produce before you do. Many are predators, like lady bugs and lacewings, and some are parasites that lay their eggs inside other insects. And then there are beneficial nematodes that attack and kill insects that live in the soil. Many birds are also insectivorous and can help to get rid of insect pests for you, and so can frogs, toads, and spiders. If you manage your garden to protect these beneficial critters, they will help you manage the pests.