A peek inside the Brassica cage

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I have my brassicas (Brussels Sprouts and PSB) inside a “cage” covered with Enviromesh, to keep the insects off them.

You can’t see much from the outside – perhaps just a glimpse of how big the plants are – so I’m briefly lifting the mesh to let you see inside…

You can see that the lower leaves have a lot of holes in them. This is because I made the mistake of planting my seedlings without first checking them for butterfly eggs. Yes, there were eggs. Lots of eggs which hatched, because when I started seeing holes appearing in those leaves I had to duck inside the mesh and pick off loads of little green caterpillars. They were so well camouflaged that I evidently didn’t find them all, because a couple of days ago I found three white butterflies flying around inside the mesh! Let’s hope they didn’t lay any more eggs before I evicted them.

Anyway, after that rather shaky start, the plants seem nice and strong now, and the recent growth is hole-free.

The caterpillar damage is not very severe, and the best thing is that in the case of both my types of plant it is not the leaves you eat. Of course you eat the flower-shoots of the PSB, and the sprouts on the Brussels Sprouts. If the plants had been cabbages, I might have been more upset…

OK now, quick, I need to put the Enviromesh back in place!

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