Cabbages and caterpillars.

What is it with caterpillars and cabbages?  I know they have to eat but why our veg?  The seeds germinate well, the small plants get transplanted and continue happily in their new place,  I make cages out of netting and still the butterflies manage to get in.  They seem quite happy to eat both red and green cabbage, brussel sprout plants, kale but - luckily for us - not cauliflowers (yet!)  The netting has quite small holes, sold either as pea or bird net, but I have seen a butterfly in the cabbage cage and then as I watched, it folded it's wings and went out through the net.  It was the middle of the morning,  I was stone cold sober,   I wasn't imagining it.

So how to stop them?  I check all the vegetables every morning and sometimes again late afternoon, pick off any caterpillars I find and put them in a bucket of water  (they don't swim very well),  but yesterday when I went to water the vegetables and the olive trees I found that the caterpillars had moved on to the kohlrabi and swede leaves!  Some days I find one or two leaves of a plant completely stripped back to the framework of the leaf but no caterpillar around.  Maybe something else is getting in the cage and eating them but there's no way a bird can get in. 

It's very frustrating and annoying - lots of our time and effort goes into the preparation of the land, digging, weeding, watering, just to fatten up a family of cabbage white butterflies and caterpillars.  And that's not even thinking about the aphids which get onto the plants as well.  Sort of a grey fly thing, tiny and very difficult to get rid of.  Maybe something to do with the caterpillars as we always seem to get both,  not one or the other.  But they don't strip a plant bare and can be washed off the leaves eventually.  Took 5 washes to get the kale clean on Sunday but it can be done. 

I know you can live in harmony with nature and that wasps, ants and ladybirds etc all do their bit to eat as many insects as possible.  There's no way we want to resort to sprays as we like to know what's going on our plates so all we can do is plant far more than we need and hope the caterpillars appetite doesn't grow when they see the extra veg that we have planted. 

One of the plants that nothing touches are the strawberries.  I made 2 new beds yesterday and planted out 40 small plants from runners.  They've been rooting in yoghurt pots and have grown out the bottom of the pots now, so I cut them away from the mother plant and transplanted them.  There are still another 37 in pots.........and lots more that have 'run' and rooted themselves in between the parent plants.  I'm going to leave them all for the time being, and next summer see how well this years 2 year olds fruit.  If they don't do well, then they'll come out this time next year and I'll use that space for something else.  Not desperately short of space so no need to get rid of them just yet.  The original mother plant is now 4 summers old and still producing fruit and babies.  This years plants are still giving us about half a kilo a week, enough to have with cornflakes for breakfast.