8 tricks for dealing with caterpillars and cutworms in the garden

Caterpillars and cutworms can wreak havoc in the garden. Here are some ways to control the populations before your garden is completely decimated.

Some caterpillars have stinging hairs, so never pick up a hairy caterpillar with your bare hands.

• Be especially careful if you encounter a caterpillar with a saddle-like marking on its back. The hairs of the saddleback caterpillar deliver a more painful sting than that of a bee.

Treat the problem safely and effectively with a bacterial insecticide that specifically targets caterpillars, such as Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).

• Harmless to animals, humans and most other insects, Bt controls cabbage worms and loopers, hornworms, fruit-tree pests and other crop-damaging caterpillars.
• It's also effective against cankerworms, fall webworms, tent caterpillars and gypsy moths.

Cedar shavings and chips — like those sold as bedding for small animals and dogs — make fragrant mulch that repels caterpillars, insects, snails and slugs.

If your cabbage loopers are chalky white and appear weak, they are infected with nuclear polyhedrosis virus (NPV).

• Process infected loopers in a blender with water, filter the solution through a coffee filter and spray it on cabbage-family crops. The remaining pests will die within three or four days.

Cutworms kill your seedlings by encircling and severing the stems.

• Stick a toothpick in the soil about six millimetres from each stem to prevent cutworms from encircling it.

• Use empty milk cartons to discourage grubs and cutworms from attacking your tomato and pepper plants.
• Cut off the tops and bottoms of the containers and when the ground is soft, push them in around the plants.

• Eliminate cutworms by tilling the soil as early in spring as possible to reduce weed seedlings — a favourite food.

Cutworms are most numerous in new beds that were formerly occupied by grasses and weeds.

• Remove both ends of an aluminum can and push it into the earth to keep cutworms away from young garden plants.
• Use a soup can or a coffee can, depending on the size you need.

Foil those cutworms!

• Before setting out tomato, pepper or eggplant seedlings, wrap each stem with a 10-centimetre square of aluminum foil; leave it loose enough to allow the stem to expand as it grows.
• Plant the seedlings with five centimetres (two inches) of foil above the soil and two inches below.