Try planting early maturing varieties to beat the munching looper’s lifecycle. Row covers provide a physical barrier and extend the growing season by adding a layer of weather protection. To protect your crops, you have to outsmart the looper’s schedule. In nature, specialists have less chance of survival as generalists, loopers are annoyingly successful. However, their taste isn’t limited to the cabbage family-they’ll eat the leaves of nearly every vegetable available in your garden. The looper eats most varieties of brassicas (aka cruciferous or cole crops), such as collards, kale, radish, turnip, broccoli and cauliflower.
The ni moth belongs to Noctuidae, the largest moth family that includes other agricultural pests, cutworms and armyworms. The mottled brown moth with about a 1-inch wingspan resembles a knobby dead leaf or tree bark. This tiny inchworm-like critter has prolegs and hindlegs and no legs in between, so it moves in a looping motion.Ĭommonly confused with other cabbage-eating caterpillars that metamorphose into white butterflies, the looper becomes the ni moth ( Trichoplusia ni), also well-camouflaged. Upon closer inspection, a thin white line runs the length of each side. Turn over a cabbage or broccoli leaf in mid-summer, and you’re likely to find a little worm, perfectly matched in color to the underside of the leaf. Examples include buckwheat, fennel, angelica, dill, goldenrod, yarrow, lovage, boneset, cilantro, and Queen Anne’s lace. To support these natural predators, braconid wasps need nectar and pollen, and plants with tiny flowers fit them well. On the hornworm’s skin, they spin tiny cocoons, pupate and emerge as adult wasps by the time the caterpillar dies.
The tiny, stingless wasp injects the caterpillar with its eggs and after hatching, the wasp larva chow down on the caterpillar’s innards, avoiding major organs to prolong the slow death, until they work their way out to the surface. They have an insidious technique for destroying the caterpillars after they’ve used them up. To limit their population in your garden, encourage parasitic braconid wasps. The moths themselves pose no risk to the nightshade family, other than laying their eggs on them for the larva to enjoy. As they drink deeply of the flower’s nectar, the moths spread pollen and help these plants develop fruits. Each has a long proboscis perfectly suited for reaching inside tubular flowers, such as morning glories, sweet potatoes, moonflowers, petunias, Datura, and four-o’-clocks. Large, strong fliers, with a wingspan up to 5½ inches, their scientific names give clues to how many pairs of yellow-orange spots decorate the body (six on the sphinx moth, five on the hawk moth). The tobacco hornworm becomes the Carolina sphinx moth ( Manduca sexta) and the tomato hornworm becomes the five-spotted hawk moth ( Manduca quinquemaculata). However, the adult moths pollinate night-blooming flowers. Both have reddish dots along the body and a curved, pointy horn on the rear, which is red on tobacco hornworms and black on tomato hornworms.Īs expected from their names, these caterpillars devour leaves of tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, peppers, eggplants and others in the Solanaceae (nightshade) family. Diagonal white lines vary from seven on tobacco hornworms to eight on tomato hornworms, with more of a V shape on the latter.
These plump, light-green caterpillars can grow as thick and long as your finger. There are two varieties of hornworms: tomato hornworms and tobacco hornworms. Let’s investigate four common caterpillars and what they mean to your garden. Note that caterpillars have stinging hairs or other irritants, so it’s a good idea to use gloves when handling ones that you don’t recognize. Identification is key in understanding whether a caterpillar is a friend or foe to your vegetable patch. You might be surprised at the adult it will become. Whether fuzzy, bumpy, spotted or striped, each one is a unique larval form of a moth or butterfly. The main purpose in life for caterpillars is to eat-and man, they’re good at it! Caterpillars are like teenagers of the garden-not only in appetite capacity, but also in that this stage of its lifecycle is temporary.
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