The cabbage white butterfly, the scourge of gardeners. Photo / Paul Thompson
Organic gardening: Cabbage White butterflies are on the wing and likely to make an appearance in your garden any day now. When they do, they will be on the lookout for your cabbages, kale, broccoli, rocket, mizuna and cauliflowers to lay their eggs on.
These cunning insects lay yellow, bullet-shaped
eggs on the underside of leaves. These hatch into green caterpillars which are the destructive part of the Cabbage white's life cycle.
The young, pale yellowish green caterpillars start life very small and rapidly increase in size as they feed on the plant they hatched out onto. Their colour intensifies to a darker green and they develop a faint orange-yellow stripe along their side.
By the time the have finished growing and are ready to pupate and emerge as adult butterflies they are about half the length of your little finger and almost as thick as a pencil. The caterpillar forms a white, silky chrysalis in the soil or on a woody plant stems and within a couple of weeks hatches into an adult butterfly ready to lay more eggs.
Plants affected by cabbage white butterflies soon start to look like a piece of holey Swiss cheese. Young plants can die and large plants become weakened and vulnerable to other pests and diseases with crops and harvests poor.
