Cabbage Worms are the Worst!

Cabbage Worms are the WORST!!!!

I inspect our cabbage and broccoli plants every day looking for these suckers. Initially, they took to liking our broccoli plants. I find several every day. And now they have found the cabbage. These suckers are the worst nemesis we have so far against any of our plants thus far. 

We thought these beautiful butterflies were the cutest and thought they were helping to pollinate our vegetables, so we let them hang around until we realized that these beauties are actually little imps in disguise. Introducing the Cabbage Butterfly and the Cabbage Looper. These guys lay eggs on the plants that produce the caterpillars. 

To learn a little more about cabbage worms, this site was a good resource from OKC Beautiful. 

Arrival of Cabbage Worms & What to Do About Them

Natural Pest Treatments

Below are some of the things we have tried. We would love to hear of any other tricks you may have to get rid of these boogers. 

Planting Herbs

We found a blog that suggested planting certain herbs around your broccoli that would help keep butterflies from laying eggs.

We planted thyme between all the plants and intermingled some onion and garlic bulbs around them as well. Needless to say, these plants did not really do much for us. One thing we thought is that maybe if we were able to do this on a larger scale, it may have more effect. Maybe it is because our broccoli has exploded in size, and the herbs are below the leaves, so they are covered and aren't really helping too much. 

Garlic Spray

We made some garlic spray. We took a recipe online and modified it some. I added cayenne pepper to mine. This seemed to work for a couple of days. Not sure how well this worked, but my cabbage and broccoli smelled really good. I love the way garlic smells, but supposedly, a lot of garden pests do not. 

"Gardening Know How" has become one of my favorite sources for information when I Google something. Here is the garlic spray recipe we started with: Garlic Spray for Garden

I am not convinced that this was the best approach, but I will keep giving it a try to keep the pesticides down to either non-existent or very low. 

Pesticides

Garden Safe Insecticide

I bought this guy in the hopes that it would get rid of the cabbage worms. I have only applied it once, but we supposedly can apply this up to ten times on each plant, as needed, all the way up to harvest time. 

Sevin

I give up! They are everywhere. We had to kill them or they were going to kill our plants! Back in early May we DID apply Sevin on the broccoli. We would not have had any broccoli if we didn't get rid of them. I was finding at least 4 caterpillars on each plant every single day. Those poor leaves didn't stand a chance. This is NOT my ideal choice for pest control. We wanted to do natural methods first. 

Cabbage Inspection

We had my eldest daughter check the cabbage leaves for eggs. Within seconds, she was hollering that she saw a bunch. So I went over to do my thorough check. I flipped a leaf over and found this. Initially it looks like dirt. But it looked strange enough to give it a closer look.

Yep! When a bit of a closer look, this was BAD! It appeared that a whole bunch of eggs had hatched and these baby cabbage worms were ALL over the place looking to taste our delicious-looking cabbage. These guys have GOT to go.