In people who are little familiar with agriculture, butterfly cabbage is a joy and associated with the arrival of summer warm days, but vegetable growers do not bode well for the appearance of this insect. A beautiful creature is a dangerous pest, its voracious offspring can cause significant damage to many garden crops.
What does the cabbage look like?
This insect is the representative of the vast family of whitecaps, it causes great harm mainly to plantations of cabbage and cruciferous vegetables, which gave rise to call it cabbage. From Eastern Europe to Sakhalin there is a small butterfly cabbage, so its description is known to most professional vegetable growers and amateurs. Her wings are white with characteristic black spots, reaching a peak of 6.3 cm. A butterfly lives in the kitchen gardens, on the roadside, in the gardens, in the park areas, on forest edges and numerous forest belts.
Already in early May butterfly cabbage produces the first caterpillars, in just a season it gives up to 5 generations. In the European climate butterflies appear from pupae in May and early August. Caterpillars of her greenish-yellow color, covered with short dark hair, have yellow stripes on the back. The main stages of development they take place in a few weeks. In the pupa stage, insects hide on the fence, in the bark of plants, among the stones.
Having begun planting cruciferous vegetables on a large scale, people created huge fabulous gardens with butterfly butterfish food on their fields, which provoked the reproduction and spread of these insects on a world scale. Worse, they feel in a hot climate with a temperature above 26 ° C and low humidity, in regions with long severe frosts below 20 ° C.
Butterfly cabbage - harm
We need to distinguish between butterflies and their numerous offspring. Caterpillars eat all kinds of cabbage, horseradish, rutabaga and radish, turnips with turnips, field plants of the cruciferous family. The butterfly itself is harmless and engaged in pollination of flowers, it does not represent an immediate danger for garden crops. Carry out preventive work on the destruction of cabbage is desirable in all stages of its development.
Butterfly cabbage on cabbage
Our insect is a highly specialized creation, adoring only cabbage cultures. The eggs lay on the underside of the leaf plate, hiding them from birds and humans. Caterpillars have a green color, well merging with cabbage leaves. Gradually they devour leaves from the edges to skeletal veins with a coarse texture. In a large number of pests completely eat up the entire head of the plant. In the question of how to protect cabbage from butterfly cabbage, you can use both folk and chemical methods.
Butterflies of cabbage on raspberries
Our heroine can be found, as in the garden, and on various trees or bushes. Often the butterflies of cabbages sit on raspberries, what should the gardener who is experiencing for planting do in this case? You can not be afraid, this insect raspberry with its hard leaves is not threatened. Sometimes for him take a butterfly hawthorn, which comes from a common family of whitecaps, has similar dimensions and coloring of the wings. This pest seriously affects the fruit and berry crops located in the vicinity of the raspberry.
Why are there butterflies in cabbage?
Beginners gardeners often get confused about the issue that butterflies eat cabbage, considering them pests of tomatoes, berry and fruit trees. Our heroes are attracted exclusively by cabbage beds and plants from the family of cruciferous. They fly often not flocks, and alone, overcoming sometimes more than 30 km per hour. The first eggs are laid on weeds, but the remaining generations are accurately attached to cultivated plants.
Fields with plantations of cruciferous vegetables are attracted to them by special substances with a bitter taste - sinigrin and sinalbin. Present these compounds and in some herbs - reseda, nasturtium, plants of the family capers. The butterfly senses the smell from these chemical compounds in a fraction of a gram, instantly determining which leaf to lay the egg on. The more often you plant monocultures in one garden, not using a crop rotation, the greater the probability of a strong infection of the site with this pest.
How to fight with a butterfly cabbage?
With whites, people fight for centuries, many different ways have been invented, how to get rid of cabbage, from exposure to insects with potent drugs to scaring butterflies with folk remedies. With a small infestation of beds with caterpillars, it is possible to limit oneself to preventive measures - safe infusions and broths, unable to critically poison the human body.
Preventive measures against butterfly butterflies:
- Ever since the start of the season, destroy weeds in the garden, butterflies lay eggs in the early spring.
- Make daily inspection of cabbage from the bottom side of the leaf, collecting egg whites.
- Autumn digging the garden helps reduce the population of cabbage.
- In autumn, inspect the bark of fruit trees, destroying the pupae.
- It is advisable to plant cabbage in the early periods before the mass migration of butterflies.
- Do not place cabbage in the neighborhood with horseradish, turnips, radishes, field mustards.
- If the bed is small, then it can be covered with a thin plastic mesh, which conducts well the sun's rays, but protects the leaves of plants from contact with the insect.
How to scare off a butterfly cabbage?
One preventive measure with a pest can not cope, if around your site is full of other gardens, there is always the possibility of migration of new generations of butterflies in the summer to your garden. In a case, how to deal with a cabbage soup, preparations based on infusions from plants are good. They do not act immediately, they have a shorter protective period than chemical products, but are practically harmless to humans. Always add liquid soap when treating cabbage in water!
Folk remedies from the butterfly cabbage butterfly:
- In 3 liters of water dilute the bottle of chemist's infusion of valerian, sprinkle the garden immediately after the preparation of the solution.
- We hang out glasses or eggshells on the bed.
- Coniferous infusion - used cones, needles, spruce or pine branches. It is necessary to insist 200 g of collected material in 2 liters of boiling water. The needles are expressed after a week, the concentrate is applied with water in a proportion of 1:10.
- Helps from the whitewash infusion of 600 g of potato leaves, aged 48 hours in a bucket of warm water.
- Sprinkling with infusion of delphinium leaves (1 kg of dry leaf per bucket of water).
- Treat the heads with a solution of ammonia - 50 g of the drug per 10 liters of water.
- Against the whitewash, use a salt solution - 2 tablespoons of salt per bucket of water.
- You can use the tomato tops to prepare a decoction. Up to 1 kg of leaves and shoots pour 3 kg of boiling water and boil for half an hour. The resulting liquid is cooled and used to treat cabbage beds.
- Soap-ash solution - half a kilo of sifted ash poured into a bucket of boiling water, insist, drain, separating the clear liquid from the sediment.
Than to poison a cabbage soup?
If the fight against cabbage leaves with folk remedies does not work, then with the widespread distribution of whitewash and its caterpillars, it is necessary to move on to insecticides of industrial production. Biopreparations of good recommendation deserve Lepidotsid, Aktofit, Bitoksibatsillin, Fitoverm . Effective chemical means are insecticides Carbofos, Actellik , Decis, Aktara.