Cutworms
If there is one pest I really hate it’s the cutworm. Although they are part of the caterpillar family, I do not put them in the same category as the cute, fuzzy caterpillars I collected as a child. Cutworms are ugly, squishy, and sometimes bristly. Even their colors of black, grey, brown, green, and white are ugly on them. They grow to about one and one-half inches long, with the adults, small brown moths, being no larger than three-fourths of an inch.
Cutworm larvae and some adult moths burrow into the soil and spend the winter underground. The larvae crawl out in the spring to start feeding on a gardener’s newly planted seedlings. The Adult moths follow the tunnels made by the larvae to emerge from the soil and will mate and lay their eggs on plant stems or in the soil in well weeded or grassy areas. A female can lay hundreds of eggs at a time. The hatched larvae from eggs laid in the fall will feed until cold weather and then go underground. There can be more than one generation a season for the cutworm’s life cycle.
Cutworms like the warm, moist weather of spring. They feed at night eating plant stems and leaves and sleep under mulch or the soil during the day. Their favorite plants are seedlings, but will gnaw on older ones, and are not particular as to the kind of vegetable plant. Some will climb up the plant to feed, but most are lazy guys and will stay at the bottom chewing on their victim until it falls over. If you notice young plants lying on the ground in the morning and they were fine the evening before, you can almost be certain it was cutworms.
There are some things you can do to prevent or destroy cutworms. Wait two weeks after you first till your soil in early spring before planting any plants. This will help destroy the larvae because they will have nothing to eat when they first emerge from the soil. This will also expose them to their natural predators such as robins, blackbirds, blue jays, and toads, just to name a few.
Plants that cutworms absolutely can’t stand are onion, garlic and tansy. Planting these intermittently throughout your garden and keeping the weeds down will help with your cutworm population, as they will have nowhere to lay their eggs.
Handpicking the little beggars, which is one of the easiest methods, is also an option, but it’s one I try to avoid. This is best done at night, with a flashlight right after a good rain or watering. Use some of their favorite plants such as sprouts or clover as bait.
The most effective deterrent for me is wrapping my seedlings in wax paper. I cut a rectangle out of wax paper measuring approximately six inches by three inches. I loosely wrap this around the stem of the plant so it doesn’t hamper any growth. I then put the plant in the ground leaving approximately two inches of the wax paper above ground. When the cutworm encounters the wax paper, it turns and goes in the other direction. Sometimes I will use thoroughly cleaned milk jugs with the bottoms cut out and place these over my seedlings until they get bigger. These jugs also act as mini greenhouses. You can also use strips of linoleum, tar paper, paper cups. The only caution I would suggest here is that you need to be mindful of any chemicals that might be on these products.
Traps such as bug zappers will attract and kill the adult moths. A mixture of molasses, sawdust and bran spread around the base of plants will attract the cutworms and cause them to become stuck and harden in the goo.
All of the above methods have been proven to be successfully as deterrents for cutworms. Whichever one a person chooses, they are sure to find success in ridding themselves of this icky pest.