Friday morning was dull and it felt pleasantly mild but, by the time we headed for the allotment in the afternoon the temperature had fallen considerably. The forecast was for light rain to begin falling during the afternoon. As it turns out that was pretty accurate.
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| Temperature & Rainfall Records 04-06 October 2018 |
We needed to pull a few more carrots and to cut a fresh cabbage to replenish our supplies of fresh vegetables. If we had time I planned to pick our quinces. However, as I had a look for a suitable cabbage to harvest I noticed that our purple sprouting broccoli was being demolished at a rapid rate by large white butterfly caterpillars.
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| Purple Sprouting Broccoli |
All our brassicas are covered with environmesh to protect them from butterflies laying their eggs on the leaves but obviously somehow a butterfly had managed to get through the cover or maybe had managed to sneak in when we were harvesting cabbages or cauliflowers.
As you can see this trio were happily munching their way through this leaf.
These two were just about to start on a fresh leaf. It seemed the easiest course of action was to carefully remove the caterpillars by hand and also pick any up that got knocked off and fell to the ground. I'm hopeful that these plants will recover to produce a decent crop. Fortunately, we have some other purple sprouting broccoli in another bed which haven't been found by any butterflies. Once all the caterpillars had been removed they were disposed of by giving the birds some extra protein.
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Well spotted!
ReplyDeleteAnother couple of days and there would have been nothing left to save.
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