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RE: Comment Challenge for Hive Gardeners! And Don't Forget the New Garden Journal Challenge starts Oct 1!

in HiveGarden2 years ago

Those are some nasty animals spoiling your crops! It's sometimes hard to find a friendly way of removing them.

As an amateur gardener that just started a small vegetable garden in his own backyard I also have small problems.
I had planted broccoli and the leaves were showing holes after a few weeks.
I suspected snails to nibble on the leaves, so I put pieces of broken egg shell and residu from grinded coffee beans around them....
Until I found out that the culprit was even smaller than I suspected:

image.png
I found this little guy on one of the leaves one day. Very tiny, but since it was just another shade of green than the leaves, I managed to spot him.

Maybe you could send me some of your birds @riverflows so they can remove all my caterpillars :D

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Those would be a nightmare for me. I would need my reading glasses to find them 🙄

Haha. I was lucky that it was much brighter colour green than the leaves of the broccoli.
But I had to get really close to the plant too 😄

 2 years ago  

hahaha me too!

 2 years ago  

Well that's interesting! I wonder if blackbirds get the caterpillar from under the leaves? I know they eat grubs in the soil. @ligayagardener might know? I tend to use the beer method. About 4on, stand in garden with beer, and pluck the caterpillars from the broccoli. Haha .. no the only think I know to do is net them so the moths or butterflies don't lay them in the first place! Grrrr... ***Shakes fist at broccoli munchers

I know 'tits' catch a lot of caterpillars when they make a nest. I have a nest box in our backyard which has a nest almost every year.
But it's autumn now and they will start making their nests in spring.

These tits I mean (own photo).
51183875297_61da9b0f57_w.jpg

 2 years ago  

aw, birds are such good peat controllers!!

They're pretty opportunistic!

oh wow this tiny little one will be hard to spot on the vegie garden, you have to look very closely to find them. I remember one of my plant got bitten and it took me so long to find it because the bug hide inside the plant.

cabbage looper worm? might need some netting to keep the white moths off the plants, unless you want to use some type of pesticide.

Oh we found the same thing in our garden. They really loves the leaves of our plants.