Wednesday, July 18, 2012

It's on! Me vs cutworm (?)

I gotta say, each day I garden, my respect for farmers grows. It seems I find some pest or disease in the garden every day. One consistent challenge I am facing are the mosquitoes in the community garden - they LOVE me.  I am not quite sure where they come from but every time I go to the garden, I make sure I am fully covered and I leave the garden dripping with sweat. Despite my long sleeve shirt and long pants, the mosquitoes are able to get me through the clothes. They also target the exposed parts like my hands. This afternoon, I got bitten on my forehead, ouch!

Anyway, this post is not about mosquitoes. Last week, I found one of my basil plant chewed up at the base of the stem, shriveled up...and well, dead. I just picked it out and forgot about it. But then yesterday I found another plant down.
Basil down! the poor shriveled up basil in the middle of the pot
Basil stem all chewed up
I'm looking to make a whole bunch of pesto so I can't have any more of them die on me. I did some googling and cutworm is good candidate for this kind of damage. I dug around the soil and I found this little guy.
Now, this doesn't look like the cutworm I found online. So maybe there are more worms deep inside the soil. In attempt to protect the rest of the basil, I put 2 toothpicks to prevent the cutworms from wrapping around the stem to chop it off (I think I got this from Mary's blog). I hope it works!

1 comment: