Organic pest control - cabbage loopers

cabbage loopers in your garden

Keep your cabbage, broccoli, and other vegetables safe from cabbage loopers with these helpful tips.

Cabbage loopers are small caterpillars with large appetites. They can be one of the most destructive pests in the vegetable garden. Bugs in the cabbage family, including cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, and gooseberries, prefer plants. This pest also attacks potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers.

Caterpillars have silvery or white stripes running back and forth like small green worms about 2 inches long. Observe them at any time from spring to autumn. Caterpillars are the larval form of white cabbage butterflies. If you see adult butterflies around your garden, look closely at their larvae.

They usually eat holes in the leaves and hide on the underside of the leaves. Their green color is difficult to detect.

Controlling Cabbage Loopers

Row Cards: In the spring, prevent white cabbage butterflies from laying eggs on plants with floating row cards. These sequence cards create a barrier that prevents insects from getting out but also allows air, light, and moisture to reach the plants. Sequence cards should be removed when your vegetable plants are growing large or when the temperature is too high in the summer.

Hand-picking: Small numbers of cabbage loopers can be easily controlled by selecting pests from the plants and dropping them in a bucket of soapy water.

Autumn Cleaning: Keep your garden clean. Pests often float in the garden litter - so clean your vegetable garden and help keep pests under control every fall.

Attract beneficial insects: Planting flowers such as marigolds, calendula, sunflower, daisy, allisum or dill will attract beneficial insects that attack and kill cabbage loopers and cabbage butterflies.

Bt: Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) can be sprayed on plants. Bt is a naturally occurring bacterial disease that only attacks caterpillars. Many vegetable gardeners consider BT to be an organic product.

Insecticides

Pesticides: Many pesticides can kill cabbage loopers effectively. The package instructions should be followed carefully.