Dan's Papers - September 26, 2008

I had been looking forward to harvesting my kale this fall. It's a wonderful deep blue green, leafy vegetable, high in vitamins A and C, that's also a good source of iron and folic acid. It tastes better than spinach or cabbage, in my opinion, although I suppose that depends on how you cook it. A friend gave me a fantastic recipe for kale barley soup that has a chicken broth base and can be made very quickly. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to be buying my kale at the farm stand.

This is a big disappointment, because it was doing so well up until about two weeks ago. I began to see small holes in the leaves and figured that a few slugs had crawled through. What a mistake. I should have taken a closer look! Someone once told me that those kinds of diagnoses in the horticultural world are called 6' disease. Because instead of actually getting in close and taking a good look, flipping over the leaves, getting out a magnifying glass and doing some reference work to actually determine the problem, I stood back, took a quick look and guessed. This was not the right approach, because after a week, the kale became skeletonized. There isn't even a lacy leaf left, just the central ribs. And down below on the stonework they once hung over, I found the evidence of a caterpillar.

A caterpillar? Well, at first that's what I thought, before I moved through the garden. I found three green, black and white striped caterpillars who must have been born mid-summer. We had sprayed BT earlier in the year to protect the oaks from the oak worm canker, so I'm guessing, but I do believe that these pests would not have survived that treatment and so hatched much later in the growing season. I put them in my bug house with a few kale leaf bits but then after I found the rest of the kale absolutely decimated I began to wonder, do I really need to find out if these caterpillars turn into beautiful butterflies or just another brown moth? Do I need to take them up to Dan Gilrhein at Cornell Cooperative Extension in Riverhead? Or should I just look it up on the Internet? Why bother satisfying my curiosity about them when it's evident that I need to get rid of them? Well, the more I know about an insect pest the better I can prepare a preventative defense against it. I have a bookshelf full of Peterson guides - maybe there's one specifically for caterpillars, pupae and chrysalises.

The burning question for me, though, is this - where did this insect come from? The garden was just built this year. I seeded in the kale and we had BT sprayed early in the year. So was it just one little moth that laid its eggs, neither of which would have been affected by the BT, and then the late season emerging caterpillars found an unexpected bonanza of food that allowed them to grow and devour? Did we import the eggs on another plant? Did the dogs bring it in?

I will never know the answer to that question, but since sanitation is the best defense, all garden debris this year will be take away. I need to get rid of all the remaining kale stalks and anything else I find these caterpillars on. If I discover them on the tomatoes that are still producing I will just squish 'em, I suppose. But there are far too many to use this as a first line of defense. I am definitely not interested in spraying anything on the food I eat. So next year I will do a little crop rotation, this fall I will turn over the soil, and next year I will keep a much closer eye on everything. And in the meantime, I'll investigate this pest and find out about its life cycle, preferred foods and ways to keep it away in the first place.

For more than 20 years, April Gonzales has been involved in garden design, installation and maintenance on the East End, as well as specimen plant scouting and site supervision for landscape architects.

Finish transplanting all perennials and shrubs. The cool weather this fall will allow everything to settle in and set root. Use a good rooting hormone, like Roots2 with iron, Panasea or Neptunes Harvest, to help the process along. This will prevent frost heave, a result of the freezing and thawing related to our erratic winters.