Thursday, 29 July 2010

It's a white out!

My inability to destroy caterpillars, despite them eating many plants, including my tomato plants (leaves only, I think I caught them before they got to the fruits), has left me with many more mouths to feed. My reasoning being I can select the leaves the eat, and keep them away from precious parts of the plants I'd rather them not eat.

Here we have some small whites, found munching on the tomato plants... ...and here we have masses of large white, and a few green veined white caterpillars found munching on my one healthy nasturtium that had not been attacked by blackfly! I cannot believe how fast they are growing, and one nasturtium leaf will last about 2 hours with them!
I used to love collecting caterpillars as a young girl, and whilst the boys don't share my passion, they are at least a little interested. Just not sure whether all this is going to come back and bite me, when I release all the butterflies for them to breed and lay yet more eggs on my poor plants :(

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  1. Pippa30 July 2010 at 20:46

    I used to love finding caterpillars and keeping them in an old fish tank when I was little!! Can always remember one awful day when they broke out and I found them all over my bedroom! I used to keep a little log book where I'd measure them to see if they were growing and record their measurements.

    I can't harm caterpillars either and usually plant nasturtiums just for the caterpillars to eat. I've recently seen lots of white butterfly activity around them, so should be looking forward to some caterpillars soon!

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