Site for ID of Brassica Pests

[GoDawgs]

I found this good site for brassica pest ID from Clemson University. It's pretty detailed with descriptions and photos of different stages of the main pests.


https://lgpress.clemson.edu/publication ... ica-crops/


The one thing I didn't see is how to deal with them but I always use bT and it takes care of all of them. My Extension agent did say though that bT is not effective on army worms when they are more than 1/2" long. Those larger ones need to be hand picked but bT will take care of the smaller ones.

[JRinPA]

I don't think BT works on the harlequin bugs. Does it?

This year I have white flies, well 3-4 weeks back. I used soapy water, but two weeks later I noticed them again. Now I think they are on the tomatoes too.

BT works on a lot of stuff, but I thought the diamond back moth worms were less affected by it than the green worms.



edit to add
you can get that crop handbook. the link is dead for the 2022. In the URL, edit it from 2022 to 2023 and it will take you to the download page. Unfortunately, it then wants your name address email etc...instead of just giving a download link. Whatever, if they want to save bandwidth by making it hard, let them save it.

[GoDawgs]

I have no idea about harlequin bugs. That's one pest we don't have here.

[bower]

BT-k should work for early instars of anything in the moth and butterfly group.
I didn't know @GoDawgs about having to hand pick the bigger ones, but it makes sense, considering the same is true for BT-i aka the mosquito dunk. This will work on anything in the fly family, but it's really only fatal to the smaller instars. You have to kill adults with soap and keep reapplying the BT-i as a drench until all of the hatches have been nipped in the bud.

We have all of the big 3 cabbageworms here, and wow do they do the job, literally skeletonized every brassica that isn't protected. A cabbage white got under my row cover as well. Diamondbacks did the brassicas in my cut and come pot, and when I went to clear out the dead plants I found them starting on the lettuces to boot!

You can't do any brassica here without row cover, all summer long.
I got mosquito netting from my fabric store on special 3 bucks a meter 8 or 9 ft wide. I need a better system for pinning down the edges but otherwise it's great. You can see through, and water through it, and so far, no rips or tears. I just hate that nonwoven crap for getting ruined in a hurry.

[ddsack]

@bower Something strange has happened here in my garden just within the last 5 or so years. I used to get cabbage butterflies every year on my broccoli crop, it was always disgusting to have to pick hidden boiled white caterpillar bodies out of my blanched broccoli before freezing. (At least they were easy to spot!) A few years ago I noticed they started arriving later each season, which was great because it was after my main crop of heads was picked. I don't remember if they even arrived last September, but this year so far I have not seen one caterpillar! I wonder what has changed, whether something about summer wind patterns blowing them up here, or heavy spraying further south of me.

[bower]

@ddsack They seem to be here all season, whether there are brassicas or not. Some time in August I thought I had seen the last cabbage white, but as soon as I planted some brassicas there were 2 or 3 fluttering around the garden every day.

I do find that butterflies in general have off years, and then years when they're insanely abundant. Same is true of moths, in general, although I don't recognize many moths as individual species - I recall a couple of years when there were so many here, the entire north side of the house was covered in moths at night! There was also one year in particular, hundreds of our common butterflies in the garden in July and August. I've not seen anything like it since. Besides the cabbage butterflies we often have a few early ones, then a gap and they turn up again after midsummer and into fall.

[rossomendblot]

I don't grow any brassicas without netting, it's impossible round here. There's an allotment a few hundred metres away, and the farmers in the area grow a lot of rapeseed. If it's not the caterpillars, it's wood pigeons or giant orange slugs. The large cabbage white butterflies are particularly devastating. With butterfly netting, I still get mealy cabbage aphid and cabbage whitefly, but these can be stopped too with a very fine mesh.

I've actually given up growing leafy brassicas which stay in the ground for a long time before harvesting, like full leaf kale, kalettes and Brussels sprouts. Kale is particularly bad for whitefly. I still grow it, but harvest the leaves at baby size for salads, which doesn't allow the aphids or whiteflies to build up in large numbers. While my red cabbages got a lot of mealy cabbage aphids this year, they only affect the outer leaves which don't get eaten anyway.