Newest Pest: Slugs

We went almost 2 weeks without a good rain. Praise God! It finally rained! And then it rained a LOT. We had so many blessings! The water tower was now overflowing, our garden got ALL the water it needed and is thriving, but along with these positives, a new pest has emerged....Slugs....

These little teenie guys were first found on our Squash and Zucchini, but it was only maybe one every other day or so. No big deal. However, after all the rain we had, I found about 20 in the broccoli between about 6 plants. That is CRAZY! And who knows how many more were hiding and I just didn't see them. I picked them off the plants, but I am not sure that my pesticides will handle slugs.

What is your favorite Go-To to get rid of slugs? I need some ideas before they move to more plants!

Why is the Broccoli so popular????

Gross!

 

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. 

Nature is pretty cool!

We have found some critters along the way so far. Some we don't mind, and others, well....let's just say they are neat until they start eating my plants. 

While getting our soil prepped, I found this little bugger that apparently is the North Carolina State Salamander. (Didn't know we even had such a thing.) This is a Marble Salamander. He stayed here in the corner of our garden for a couple of days. I guess he really loved the moist soil over there. We did hunt for him before we started tilling the dirt and we were unable to find him. We had a couple of days where it got above 80 and the dirt dried out a lot more than he probably liked, so we are guessing he moved on to better places. 

Our first sighted pest. This is a cabbage worm. Butterflies and moths will lay eggs near these types of plants (specifically broccoli, cabbage, etc). This broccoli has only been in the ground for 2 days and already has visitors and chomping up the leaves. I captured them and we have placed them in caterpillar jail. No cabbage worms were harmed in this transition. 😁 The kids love these things so much, we are going to keep them, feed them our salad scraps, and put them in a butterfly house. Turning our garden pests into a fun science learning activity. We are going to watch them grow!

I am sure this will not be the last of our pests. We are certain it will be a long battle throughout the summer. We research for the best methods and try multiple things. For cabbage worms, we are probably going to try either planting thyme around the broccoli which these critters don't particularly like, or we will sprinkle some cornmeal on the leaves of the plants and the cabbage worms will eat these instead of the broccoli leaves and they will probably swell up and die. That last one is not really our preferred method, because nature has been good to us, but we also want to make sure we are doing our best to protect our garden.