I currently have six little cabbages growing from when I planted them last May. They all look like pretty healthy, happy cabbages (I presume anyway since I have never grown them before). But I got a preview of the Cabbage Leaf Butterfly already; once a day for the last week, I have found a fat green caterpillar munching away at my cabbage leaves.

So for now I have resigned myself to picking off caterpillars until they run out of eggs, but this puts me in the mood for an experiment. Only three of my cabbages seem to be affected, and the other three untouched. Also, I have eight very small cabbages that have popped up from seed planted into toilet rolls. This gives me 11 little cabbages to play with. I read about a couple of ways to stop butterflies from laying eggs in cabbages and I’m going to try out the suggestions on my own cabbages:

1. Use decoy butterflies to trick the real butterflies into thinking their nesting place is already being guarded. Apparently butterflies are quite aggressive and will defend a cabbage patch from intruders. Butterflies seeking to lay their eggs in some cabbage see the decoy and fly off to find a new spot.
2. Create a butterfly-proof barrier by covering a cabbage with part of an old nylon stocking and letting the cabbage grow within the stocking until it is ready to eat

I am a bit wary of the stocking idea, a) because I don’t have many old stockings, and b) because slugs might happily live under the stocking. On the other hand, the decoy idea might not work at all if we have particularly smart butterflies in our area! So I’ll try both at the same time with an unprotected control group and see what happens!