Organic Gardening Observation: Cabbage Worms

Reflecting over the season, we did notice one thing that will be of use in our garden planning for 2012. We had tons of cabbage moths and cabbage worms. Even when we had row cover on, they would find a way in!! But we did notice that they largely left the purple sprouting broccoli and the red cabbage alone. We did have some on the red cabbage, but not like on the green ones. I think the moths tend to avoid this since their babies (green cabbage worms) would stick out like a sore thumb on the purple foliage -- making it easy for predators to spot. We also found that growing dill with the cabbage family plants helped a lot too. This attracted the wasps (predators of the cabbage worms) that patrolled our plants for us.

Cabbage worm and his eaten leaf