Well we chickened out of separating the pups from the mothers this weekend but we ended up doing something equally difficult: we pulled out all our broccoli. Unfortunately the caterpillars were victorious. They gorged themselves very happily on most of our broccoli leaves and despite trying to remove as many of them as possible we realised we were defeated and there were simply too many of those voracious little creatures. Even if we spent an entire day digging them out from around the foliage and scraping them off the leaves, we still wouldn't find them all.
It was a shame as we were just starting to get some broccoli heads after so many months of waiting. Doubt we could have eaten any of that broccoli though considering how many small caterpillars had burrowed their ways into the florets too.
So one by one we pulled out each broccoli plant. Some of the plants near the back fence were reduced to pale green skeletons as the caterpillars had devoured all the fleshy parts of the leaves leaving only the harder green stems.
Apparently, the best way to prevent caterpillars attacking your broccoli is to cover the plants just after you've sown the seeds and make sure the cover is held down tightly with landscaping pins. Seeing as we didn't do this and the caterpillars struck we could have, if we'd done this as soon as we spotted the first caterpillars, used a soil bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis which is a naturally occuring soil bacteria to kill them off. Well, we'll know for next time.
On a happier note, we harvested some more tomatoes and also some courgettes, baby courgettes. For some reason our courgettes now seem to be rotting when they reach a certain size. They were growing quite well in July and when we went on holiday in August we came back to find three very large marrows in the courgette patch. However, since the marrow-episode we haven't had as many courgettes (that's usually because if you let the vegetables reach that size, the plant thinks job done,time for a rest!) and the few we have had start rotting very soon after the flowers fall off.
Despite this we managed to harvest at least five healthy-looking baby courgettes and made a very delicious tomato and courgette pesto linguine. I'll upload the recipe in the next post.
3 comments:
Perhaps next time you could try asking the caterpillars to move on. Say you give them 2 days to find another home, and if they don't listen then I guess you have to do what you have to. But don't be too disappointed about the brocolli - you fed the whole caterpillar family, and you still have the courgettes!
Hee hee! No one usually listens to me, I doubt the caterpillars would have paid any attention but you never know. ;-) You're right, we've had a good crop of courgettes and even though the tomaotes are feeling a little poorly at the moment, we've had a good harvest of those too so I shouldn't complain.
Remember to make batches of tomato sauce and freeze them ready for the winter months! I've been making Italian bread this morning - they're in the oven right now and the smell is absolutely yummy yummy! I've stuffed them with garlic and onions and spices!Hmmmmmmmmmmm
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