The cabbage worm

Walking through our cabbage patch.....and area with about 4000 cabbage, we walked past a poor cabbage that was under siege.
On the cabbage was about 15 worms which had obliterated a cabbage and were spreading to the cabbages next to the 'homebase'.

Done in a single night

The Culprits

Literally continuously poo to make space to eat more! Like our kids

Being our 1st cabbage crop, and not being naturally green-fingered, we weren't sure what to do.
We want to save the crop. We also wanted to remain organic and not use pesticides.
We had a few hours to find a solution or apparently these little worms could spread quickly and take out an entire crop if not sorted out.

Thankfully, being part of a small farming community, there were some helping hands who were willing to offer advice and help.

• Either go through each plant and remove the worms manually.....Argh ,can you imagine!?
• Diatomaceous earth: Diatomaceous earth is ground up fossilized sea shells. Diatomaceous earth will puncture soft bodied insects and they will dehydrate and die. Local nurseries should carry diatomaceous earth.
• Natural sprays like garlic and oil spray. Or perhaps a citrus spray that worms don't like made up of any citrus fruit (oranges/lemons/grapefruit).
• You could also try an mix of peppers, peppercorn and spearmint to spray over the plants
• You can put inside netting or enclosure to prevent the bugs getting to them, but this takes money and time Before they actually arrive.
• Get a food source that not only feeds the plant, but the mix doesn't sit well with the worms.

Since we had about an acre of land to spray, it would be a lot of natural ingredients to cook up and spray....we didn't have the time or ingredients to do that.
We could start walking through the land and removing the worms by hand (didn't want to-rather work smart than just hard)

So speaking to a local farmer who said when he started using a food called Ecogro his worm issues stopped. He also said he had some and could give to us for the time being. Mix in with water and go ahead. This sounded like a great option.
We took this option and sprayed some terribly stinky liquid fertilizer over all the cabbage by hand. Here is what is in the fertilizer :

Father in law spraying

This worked a charm actually. Slowly the worms started dying. I don't know what it was that they couldn't deal with, but essentially we were feeding the plants and saving them from pests in one go!
What a pleasure.

These little worms come from a pretty little butterfly.

So when you see these pretty buggers all over your garden, just know that they're not there to make things look all pretty, but there to find a breeding ground and nursery for their babies!

Thankfully the intervention worked for us, and because we were able to mix in just a little of the food into many litres of water, we now have the watering system setup to distribute the food to the plants quickly, and without coming home smelling like you've rolled around in chicken poo!

Now we add a few litres into a tank, and spray quickly over all the plants through the overhead sprinkler system.

Unfortunately this doesn't work with all the little creatures that want to make your land a salad bar, so the rest of them were still working out as we go!

Healthy cabbage just afterwards without any worms

Hopefully this helped someone looking for similar advice.

Cheers all

[Image credit www.thelivingfarm.org]