Squishing caterpillars
clk
Posts: 95
It's just ocurred to me and I know it's the wrong time of year to be wondering about this but the advice from organic gardeners is to squish caterpillar 'pests'. I don't understand the point of attracting butterflies to the garden if that is what is recommended we do to their offspring. Any ideas?
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It it's cabbage white offspring I'm happy to squish, I don't grow food to feed caterpillars. Need it for us.
I net the cabbages, so the butterflies can lay their eggs on the nasturtiums, and the birds can pick them off.
Fidget, due to shortage of space I grow veg in with flowers so I can't easily net. Do net some that stand alone, but this year I've also had cabbage white caterpillars on some flowers and herbs
I can't squish them at all - I put them on the bird table but sometimes they slink off.
Butterflies lay that many eggs some are going to get away even if you do squish them.
I will squish cabbage whites if they are eating brassicas, (but I don't grow many of them).
I wouldn't dream of squishing anything else (other than vineweevils and leatherjackets).
I don't see the point in killing the very things you're trying to attract, but you need to decide what it is you want to do in your garden. Advice given by experts is all too often just rules they were told. We should never blindly follow rules. That advice could well have been good for the farmer getting a crop to market. It may make it easy to harvest or easy to store the produce or make the size of the crop greater. The advice may have no relevance to us with very different requirements. For example a famer grows for weight, you, if growing food, want flavour. Those two requirements are sometimes inversely proportional.
If you have a well balanced garden you won't nee to kill anything. Personally I didn't become a gardener to be a butcher.
Most of the butterflies we are trying to attract lay their eggs on nettles. The caterpillars that are a pest on plants other than brassicas are usually types of saw fly
Nettles are the primary larval foodplant for several of the more easily recognisable butterflies, but there are loads more butterflies whose larval foodplants are becoming more and more scarce - it wouldn't be too difficult to plant a few of them in our gardens
http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/foodplants.php
Hi Dove, that's a good link. No point growing Barren strawberries for Grizzled Skipper if they don't live in your area.