Controlling Cutworms in Your Garden

Anyone who has made a vegetable garden more than a single season has encountered a cutworm or two. More than likely, you have been afflicted by dozens of them. Actually, some gardeners have heard them invading their garden at night. You can hear them chomping at the stalks of your tender young plants. Some have tried to control them by keeping the adults and eggs at bay. This is only a partial fix because the adult moths can fly from place to place. You can get rid of them today, and they can be replaced tomorrow. The best solution is to attack the caterpillars that eat your plants.

Unless you are hooked on organic gardening, the easiest way by far to control cut worms is with pesticides. Depending on where you live, there are a variety of liquid and powder type insecticides available. These are generally water soluble . With minimal care, none of the products leave a toxic residue that is absorbed into the fruit or vegetable. If you have young produce growing already when you dust or spray, just wash the vegetables or fruit before it's consumed. My experience has been that this solves every cutworm problem.

For a more organic approach, additional work is required. You can take a flashlight out at night and look for the critters. However, you run the risk of being too late or too early and miss the larvae. If you do find them, pluck them off and kill them. Most people who have a decent sized garden don't really like this approach because it is slow and failure is frequent.

You can work to get natural predators that feed on the cutworms or the adult moths. However, if you aren't careful, the predators can end up being more of a nuisance than the cutworms. It is a way to control them naturally.

Putting up a small barricade made of cardboard around each plant is a relatively easy way to protect your plants. This, again, is a slow process, but it can be quite effective. The barrier has to extend below the ground an inch or two and out of the ground about the same. This stops the cutworms from reaching the plant.

Some gardeners have used a sweet mixture of cereal and sawdust with molasses to make a trap for the cutworms. They become stuck in the goo and make breakfast for the early bird. Other home remedies for these creatures has included using tin cans around the plants or by crushing egg shells to make it tough for the larvae to reach the plant healthy enough to consume it.